Air-coupled guided wave detection and wavenumber filtering to full-field representation of delamination in composite plates

Delamination faults in composite plates are considered dangerous as they can cause catastrophic failure before being visually assessed. Effects of delaminations are particularly relevant in guided waves scattering, local resonances and mode conversion. Detecting and analyzing these phenomena is relevant for plate characterization. In this work, leaky guided waves are used to detect delamination in composite plates. To such purpose, a hybrid ultrasonic set-up and a dedicated signal processing are proposed. An air-probe with a proper lift-off is used to detect the leakage in terms of air pressure wave over the plate surface. A piezoelectric transducer is used to generate acoustic guided waves in the composite plate. Multiple acquisitions are averaged to increase the SNR for each position of the air-probe. Curvelet Transform (CT) domain processing of the projection coefficients of the acquired elastic wave is exploited to decompose waves that are overlapped both in the time/space and in the frequency/wavenumber domain. In fact, CT is a special member of the family of multiscale and multidimensional transforms whose spatial and temporal localization is very well suited for processing signals which are sparse in the above mentioned domains. In this work this sparsity is exploited to emphasize the information of leaky guided waves scattered by the delamination by removing from the data the information related to the incident wave field. As an application, the presence of a delamination generated by a 21 Joule impact performed on a 4.9 mm thickness composite laminate was detected contactless by exploiting guided wave leakage.