A New Approach to Guided Wave Ray Tomography for Temperature-Robust Damage Detection Using Piezoelectric Sensors

In this paper, a new approach to guided wave ray tomography for temperature-robust damage detection with time-of-flight (TOF) temperature compensation is developed. Based on the linear relationship between the TOF of a guided wave and temperature, analyses show that the TOF of the baseline signal can be compensated by the temperature measurement of the inspected materials without estimating the temperature compensation parameters. The inversion is based on the optimization of the TOF misfit function between the inspected and compensated baseline TOFs of the guided waves, and is applied by the elastic net penalty approach to perform thickness change mapping in a structural health monitoring (SHM) application. Experiments that are conducted in isotropic plates by piezoelectric sensors demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. According to the results, our approach not only eliminates the artefacts that are caused by a temperature variation from 25 °C to 70 °C but also provides more accurate and clearer imaging of damage than conventional ray tomography methods.