Detection of Surface Breaking Cracks Filled With Solid Impurities Using a Baseline-Free NEWS-TR Method

Xiaoshu Qin; Siqi Zhang; Changhang Xu; Jing Xie; Guoming Chen; Gangbing Song

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2982182

IEEE Access (Jan 2020)

Detection of Surface Breaking Cracks Filled With Solid Impurities Using a Baseline-Free NEWS-TR Method

Xiaoshu Qin,
Siqi Zhang,
Changhang Xu,
Jing Xie,
Guoming Chen,
Gangbing Song

Affiliations

Xiaoshu Qin: College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China
Siqi Zhang: College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China
Changhang Xu: ORCiD; College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China
Jing Xie: College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China
Guoming Chen: ORCiD; College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Qingdao, China
Gangbing Song: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2982182
Journal volume & issue: Vol. 8
pp. 56908 – 56920

Abstract

Read online

The use of piezoceramic transducers for cracks identification via guided wave has attracted significant attention recently. Most studies assume that the medium in surface breaking cracks is only air. However, it is common that such cracks are filled with impurities (e.g. dust, grease) due to its exposure to the operational environment. The impurities may affect the propagation of the ultrasonic guided wave and hence it is of practical interest to develop detection methods for surface breaking cracks filled with impurities. This work investigates the possible effect of contact acoustic nonlinearity (CAN) on detecting surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities. A baseline-free method is proposed to detect surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities using the nonlinear elastic wave spectroscopy (NEWS) as a pre-treatment of time-reversal (TR). This method involves three key issues: selecting low-frequency swept signal modulated by Hanning window as an excitation signal, comparing the initial filtered response with the nonlinear time reversal response to determine the nonlinear feature related to such cracks, and determining the recommended low cut-off frequency to extract such nonlinear feature. The feasibility of the proposed method is experimentally and numerically verified using aluminum beams with surface breaking cracks. Results show that due to the existence of solid impurities, the crack interacts with low-frequency ultrasonic waves, which leads to nonlinear components in the response signal. It also indicates that after the time-reversal processing, the shifting of the maximum peak frequency from the second harmonic range to the third harmonic range can be used as a damage-sensitive nonlinear feature for detecting such cracks. The proposed method provides a promising way to identify surface breaking cracks filled with solid impurities without reference signal.

Published in IEEE Access

ISSN: 2169-3536 (Online)
Publisher: IEEE
Country of publisher: United States
LCC subjects: Technology: Electrical engineering. Electronics. Nuclear engineering
Website: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=6287639

About the journal

Abstract

Keywords