Fast wavenumber measurement for accurate and automatic location and quantification of defect in composite

As the use of and dependence on composite materials is increasing in all industries, there is a strong need for reliable, accurate, and fast techniques for damage detection and quantification in composite plate-like structures. Among the various nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring techniques, many rely on Lamb wave long-range propagation. A wavenumber quantification technique called frequency domain instantaneous wavenumber has been previously proven to be an efficient technique to estimate in-plane (i.e. position) and out-of-plane (i.e. depth) coordinates of defects in composites. This paper further develops this technique by (1) reducing the acquisition time by one order of magnitude while improving the quality of detection, (2) implementing an automatic feature extraction process to automatically assess the geometry and obtain information which can be directly used for decision making, and (3) quantifying the cumulative error of the whole process.