Damage Assessment for a Sandwich-Like Panel Using Experimental and Numerical Analysis of Guided Waves

The presence of damage significantly affects the system’s performance. Various damage detection methods are available to identify damage in engineering structures. The guided wave propagation-based nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methods have proven their potential to effectively identify damage in such advanced structures due to the long-distance inspection capability and the capacity to interrogate the whole thickness of a structure. Therefore, in the present study, the laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) and numerical simulations are used to study the guided wave propagation and their capabilities to identify different types of damage regions in a sandwich-like structure comprising of an aramid core and aluminum skin. The piezoelectric sensor-based excitation is used. The damage involved in this study is barely visible impact damage (BVID) of different diameters and a hole. The presence of damages causes abrupt changes to the wave field of the guided waves. Full field and elliptical-based signal processing methods are used in determining the region of damage. Thus, the damage region is visualized in this comparative study.