Implementation of the Surface Response to Excitation (SuRE) Method with DSP’s for Detection of the Damage of Thick Blocks

Surface Response to Excitation Method (SuRE) is an active structural health monitoring (SHM) method. SuRE method was implemented by exciting the surface of a plate with a piezoelectric element. The propagation of the created surface waves were monitored with one or more sensors. These sensors could be piezoelectric elements or noncontact sensors such as laser scanning vibrometer. During the experiments, one of the piezoelectric elements excited the block at the 20-400 KHz range while the signals of other piezoelectric elements were recorded and their spectrums were calculated. The reference spectrums of sensors were obtained when the block had no defect. However, in the presence of defect the spectrum deviates from reference response. SuRE method quantifies these changes by calculating sum of square of differences (SSD). It is shown that SuRE method is able to effectively detect the defects. doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/233