Damage localization in composite plates using canonical polyadic decomposition of Lamb wave difference signals tensor

Abstract

Monitoring in real-time and autonomously the health state of aeronautic structures is referred to as Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and is a process decomposed in four steps: damage detection, localization, classification, and quantification. The structure under study is here a complex aeronautic nacelle and the focus is put on the localization step of the SHM process. The fact that SHM data are naturally three-way tensors is here investigated for this purpose. It is demonstrated that under classical assumptions regarding wave propagation, the canonical polyadic decomposition of rank 2 of the tensor built from the phase of the difference signals between a healthy and damaged states provides direct access to the distances between the piezoelectric elements and the damage. This property is used here to propose an original and robust tensor-based damage localization algorithm. This algorithm is successfully validated on experimental data coming from the aeronautic nacelle equipped with 30 mounted piezoelectric elements.