A phase synthesis time reversal impact imaging method for on-line composite structure monitoring

Comparing to active damage monitoring, impact localization on composite by using time reversal focusing method has several difficulties. First, the transfer function of the actuator-sensor path is difficult to be obtained because of the limitation that no impact experiment is permitted to perform on the real structure and the difficulty to model it because the performance of real aircraft composite is much more complicated comparing to metal structure. Second, the position of impact is unknown and can not be controlled as the excitation signal used in the active monitoring. This makes it not applicable to compare the difference between the excitation and the focused signal. Another difficulty is that impact signal is frequency broadband, giving rise to the difficulty to process virtual synthesis because of the highly dispersion nature of frequency broadband Lamb wave in plate-like structure. Aiming at developing a practical method for on-line localization of impact on aircraft composite structure which can take advantage of time reversal focusing and does not rely on the transfer function, a PZT sensor array based phase synthesis time reversal impact imaging method is proposed. The complex Shannon wavelet transform is presented to extract the frequency narrow-band signals from the impact responded signals of PZT sensors. A phase synthesis process of the frequency narrow-band signals is implemented to search the time reversal focusing position on the structure which represents the impact position. Evaluation experiments on a carbon fiber composite structure show that the proposed method realizes the impact imaging and localization with an error less than 1.5 cm. Discussion of the influence of velocity errors and measurement noise is also given in detail.