The pitch-catch nonlinear ultrasonic imaging techniques for structural health monitoring

Abstract

Nonlinear ultrasonic imaging techniques in pulse-echo configuration have recently shown their potential to allow the effective separation of nonlinear and linear features in a nonlinear image. In this study, two ultrasonic phased arrays are implemented to produce an image of elastic nonlinearity through the parallel-sequential subtraction of the coherently scattered components in the through-transmission acoustic field at the transmission or subharmonic frequency. In parallel mode, a physical focus at each pixel is achieved by firing the transmitters with a predefined delay law. In sequential mode, each transmitter is fired in sequence and all the receivers are employed to capture the data simultaneously. This full matrix captured data can be post-processed and focused synthetically at the target area. The images of parallel focusing and sequential focusing are expected to be linearly identical and hence any differences remained on the subtracted image can be related to the nonlinearities arising from the defects. Therefore, the imaging metric here is defined as the difference between parallel and sequentially focused amplitudes obtained from forward coherently scattered fields at each target point. Additionally, the negative influences due to the instrumentation nonlinearities are investigated by studying the remaining relative phase and amplitude at undamaged pixels. A compensation method is implemented to suppress these noises, significantly enhancing the selectivity of nonlinear scattering features. The proposed techniques are then implemented to monitor fatigue crack growth in order to explore the capability of these methods as measures of elastic nonlinearity induced by different sizes of small closed cracks. The promising results suggest that nonlinear imaging can be used to monitor crack growth and improve the detectability at early stages.