Reference-free damage localization in time-space domain for structural health monitoring of X-COR sandwich composites

This article presents a guided wave based damage localization framework using a time-space analysis for structural health monitoring of X-COR sandwich composites with a reference-free perspective to overcome the difficulty in detecting reflected guided waves in a highly attenuated media. Transducers, including macro-fiber composites and piezoelectric wafers, are used to design the sensing paths. The time-space domain is constructed using de-noised signals that are processed by signal processing techniques including matching pursuit decomposition and Hilbert transform. The localization framework is then validated across a wide range of excitation frequencies in X-COR sandwich composites with seeded facesheet delamination. The results indicate that time-space analysis offers a high accuracy for detection and localization of internal damages and serves as a promising framework for structural health monitoring of complex sandwich composites with reinforcements. This work also provides a comprehensive study of the changes in group velocities, attenuation tendencies, and time-space resolution of actuated and converted modes under different excitation frequencies across a range of ultrasonic transducer sizes, thereby helping to improve reliability and accuracy of damage localization in time-space domain.