Ultrasonic Guided waves Communications in smart materials: the case of tapered waveguides

Besides being used for inspections, piezoelectric transducers can be adopted to communicate the results of the inspection itself, for example a damage indicator, to a central processing unit, thus avoiding the need of communication cables or radio modules. However, classical coding and decoding procedures based on matched filters lose their effectiveness in case of guided wave communications because of the detrimental effect of dispersion. A new decoding procedure capable to compensate for dispersive guided waves signals propagating in regular and irregular waveguides is proposed in this work. The presented procedure is suitable for guided waves communications in irregular waveguides and can be applied in many Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) applications. A proof-of-concept related to a tapered steel rod will be demonstrated.