Temperature Compensation for Damage Detection in Composite Structures using Guided Waves

Abstract

Guided wave based SHM poses a suitable technique in terms of damage detectability in composite structures with complex geometries. One of the main challenges for the application of the technique resides in the broad spectrum of environmental and operational conditions of an aircraft. A test series including changing temperature and realistic impact damages has been performed to evaluate data normalization approaches. Within the EU-funded DEMETER project, composite plates with co-bonded structural elements and an integrated SHM network have been manufactured for testing. The presented work focuses on the damage detection in varying temperature conditions using a data-driven method. The data-based approach addresses the damage identification as a pattern recognition problem, generating knowledge from previously collected data. The key aspects of this article include the extraction of the damage relevant features, the pattern recognition concept for the data normalization and the subsequent damage detection.