Compressive sensing with frequency warped compensation for damage detection in composite plate

This work focuses on an ultrasonic guided wave structural health monitoring (SHM) system development for composite plate inspection. The development of an in situ health monitoring system that can inspect large areas and communicate remotely to the inspector is highly computational demanding due to both the huge number of piezoelectric sensors needed and the high sampling frequency. To address this problem, a general approach for low rate sampling is developed. Compressive Sensing (CS) has emerged as a potentially viable technique for the efficient acquisition that exploits the sparse representation of dispersive ultrasonic guided waves in the frequency warped basis. The framework is applied to lower the sampling frequency and to enhance defect localization performances of Lamb wave inspection systems. As a result, an automatic detection procedure to locate defect-induced reflections was demonstrated and successfully tested on simulated Lamb waves propagating in a carbon fiber plate using PZFlex software. The proposed method is suitable for defect detection and can be easily implemented for real application to structural health monitoring.