An empirical study on transmission beamforming for ultrasonic guided-wave based structural health monitoring

Cantero-Chinchilla, Sergio; Aranguren, Gerardo; Malik, Muhammad Khalid; Etxaniz, Josu; de la Escalera, Federico Mart�n

Abstract

© 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The development of reliable structural health monitoring techniques is enabling a healthy transition from preventive to condition-based maintenance, hence leading to safer and more efficient operation of different industries. Ultrasonic guided-wave based beamforming is one of the most promising techniques, which supports the monitoring of large thin-walled structures. However, beamforming has been typically applied to the post-processing stage (also known as virtual or receiver beamforming) because transmission or physical beamforming requires complex hardware configurations. This paper introduces an electronic structural health monitoring system that carries out transmission beamforming experiments by simultaneously emitting and receiving ultrasonic guided-waves using several transducers. An empirical characterization of the transmission beamforming technique for monitoring an aluminum plate is provided in this work. The high signal-to-noise ratio and accurate angular precision of the physical signal obtained in the experiments suggest that transmission beamforming can increase the reliability and robustnessof this monitoring technique for large structures and in real-world noisy environments.

Citation

Cantero-Chinchilla, S., Aranguren, G., Malik, M. K., Etxaniz, J., & de la Escalera, F. M. (2020). An empirical study on transmission beamforming for ultrasonic guided-wave based structural health monitoring. Sensors, 20(5), Article 1445. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20051445

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 3, 2020
• Online Publication Date: Mar 6, 2020
• Publication Date: Mar 6, 2020
• Deposit Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 12, 2020
• Journal: Sensors (Switzerland)
• Electronic ISSN: 1424-8220
• Publisher: MDPI
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 20
• Issue: 5
• Article Number: 1445
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/s20051445
• Keywords: SHM; structural inspection; ultrasonic guided-waves; transmission beamforming; phased-array
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/4106439
• Publisher URL: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/5/1445