Multidimensional guided wave dispersion recovery for locating defects in composite materials

This paper provides a framework for characterizing anisotropic guided waves to locate damage in composite structures. Composite guided wave structural health monitoring is a significant challenge due to anisotropy. Wave velocities and attenuation vary as a function of propagation direction. Traditional localization algorithms, such as triangulation and delay-and-sum beamforming, fail for composite monitoring because they rely on isotropic velocity assumptions. Estimating the anisotropic velocities is also challenging because the inverse problem is inherently ill-posed. We cannot solve for an infinite number of directions with a finite number of measurements. This paper addresses these challenges by deriving a physics-based model for unidirectional anisotropy and integrating it with sparse recovery tools and matched field processing to characterize composite guided waves and locate an acoustic source. We validate our approach with experimental laser doppler vibrometry measurements from a glass fiber reinforced composite panel. We achieve localization accuracies of more than 290 and 49 times better, respectively, than delay-and-sum and matched field processing with isotropic assumptions.