Towards an industrial deployment of PZT based SHM processes: A dedicated metamodel for Lamb wave propagation

Abstract

Numerical simulations of Structural Health Monitoring processes based on wave propagation can be very costly in terms of computation time, especially for complex aeronautic composite structures, and therefore strongly limits the deployment of industrial applications. Metamodels build a relatively simple relationship between inputs and outputs from a set of data and thus can overcome that difficulty. A metamodel based on radial basis functions interpolation is build in order to predict a Lamb Wave measurement on a damaged composite plate equipped by a network of 3 piezoelectric elements. The input parameters describe the position of the damage. This surrogate model is used to predict the measured signals for new damage configurations with a limited computational cost. Moreover, this metamodel is used in a reverse way to solve the inverse problem. A swarm particle optimisation algorithm seeks to find the position of a damage from a set of simulated signals.This approach allows us to identify correctly the damage localisation for an unknown configuration, providing therefore a new method for damage localization.