Coda wave interferometry-based very early stage bolt looseness monitoring using a single piezoceramic transducer

Abstract The traditional monitoring methods can only give warnings for the bolts with severe looseness. However, it is essential for the safety of bolted joints to detect the looseness of bolts at the very early stage. To this end, in this paper, coda wave interferometry (CWI)-based high-resolution bolt preload monitoring using a single piezoceramic transducer is proposed. According to the CWI and acoustoelastic theories, a theoretical model is established and the linear relationship between the time shifts of coda waves and the preload variations of the bolt is derived. An experiment, in which a piezoceramic transducer simultaneously functions as the actuator and sensor, was carried out to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Three lead zirconium titanate transducers at different locations of a bolted specimen are tested. The experimental results show that the time shifts of coda waves increase linearly with the decrease of bolt preload and the detectable resolution of bolt preload (DRBP) is up to 0.326%. The DRBP value proves that the proposed technique can successfully monitor bolt looseness at the very early stage. In addition, a comparison study is carried out between the CWI-based method and the energy-based wavelet packet decomposition (WPD) method, and the result shows that the preload sensitivity of the CWI-based method is about six times higher than that of the WPD approach. Therefore, the CWI-based method is an effective way for the in situ monitoring of bolt looseness, especially in the embryonic stage.