A New Structural Health Monitoring System for Composite Plate

Damage detection in composite materials can be divided into active and passive approaches. The active approach is usually based on various non-destructive techniques utilizing actuators and/or receivers. Simple laser scans, revealing the change in Lamb wave response amplitudes, have been used to locate delamination and estimate its severity in a composite plate. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated through experimental studies in which input signals exerted at piezoelectric (PZT) patches on a composite plate are successfully reconstructed by using the time reversal method. The ultimate goal of this study is to develop a reference-free damage diagnosis technique based on the time reversal process so that defects can be identified without relying on any past baseline data.