Quantitative damage imaging using Lamb wave diffraction tomography

In this paper, we investigate the diffraction tomography for quantitative imaging damages of partly through-thickness holes with various shapes in isotropic plates by using converted and non-converted scattered Lamb waves generated numerically. Finite element simulations are carried out to provide the scattered wave data. The validity of the finite element model is confirmed by the comparison of scattering directivity pattern (SDP) of circle blind hole damage between the finite element simulations and the analytical results. The imaging method is based on a theoretical relation between the one-dimensional (1D) Fourier transform of the scattered projection and two-dimensional (2D) spatial Fourier transform of the scattering object. A quantitative image of the damage is obtained by carrying out the 2D inverse Fourier transform of the scattering object. The proposed approach employs a circle transducer network containing forward and backward projections, which lead to so-called transmission mode (TMDT) and reflection mode diffraction tomography (RMDT), respectively. The reconstructed results of the two projections for a non-converted S0 scattered mode are investigated to illuminate the influence of the scattering field data. The results show that Lamb wave diffraction tomography using the combination of TMDT and RMDT improves the imaging effect compared with by using only the TMDT or RMDT. The scattered data of the converted A0 mode are also used to assess the performance of the diffraction tomography method. It is found that the circle and elliptical shaped damages can still be reasonably identified from the reconstructed images while the reconstructed results of other complex shaped damages like crisscross rectangles and racecourse are relatively poor.