Wave packet separation based corrosion damage detection for aircraft structures

To guarantee the safety and reliability of aircraft structures, Lamb wave based structural health monitoring has been widely used in recent years. However, there are several factors that severely restrict its practical application, such as dispersion effect and complex boundary reflection. The overlap and deformation in wave packets make it difficult to extract the damage characteristics from the complex Lamb wave signals. To tackle this problem, a latent variable model based wave packet separation method is developed in this paper. Aimed at corrosion damage detection, several damage indices are investigated experimentally. By choosing the most sensitive damage index, the validity and the accuracy of the proposed method in corrosion damage detection are demonstrated through the corrosion experiments.