Harnessing sparsity in lamb wave-based damage detectionfor beams

Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a necessity for reliable and efficient functioning of engineering systems. Damage detection (DD) is a crucial component of any SHM system. Lamb waves are a popular means to DD owing to their sensitivity to small damages over a substantial length. This typically involves an active sensing paradigm in a pitch-catch setting, that involves two piezo-sensors, a transmitter and a receiver. In this paper, we propose a data-intensive DD approach for beam structures using high frequency signals acquired from beams in a pitch-catch setting. The key idea is to develop a statistical learning-based approach, that harnesses the inherent sparsity in the problem. The proposed approach performs damage detection, localization in beams. In addition, quantification is possible too with prior calibration. We demonstrate numerically that the proposed approach achieves 100% accuracy in detection and localization even with a signal to noise ratio of 25 dB.