Original Article

Structural Health Monitoring

1–23

A Bayesian fusion method for Ó The Author(s) 2020

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composite damage identification DOI: 10.1177/1475921720945000
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using Lamb wave

Haode Huo1,2, Jingjing He1 and Xuefei Guan3

Abstract
This study presents a novel method for composite damage identification using Lamb wave. A probabilistic integration of
the elliptical loci method and the RAPID (reconstruction algorithm for probabilistic inspection of defects) in a Bayesian
framework is proposed. The proposed method allows for the incorporation of multiple damage sensitive features in a
rational manner to improve the reliability and robustness for a given array of sensors. Numerical studies are performed
to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and to compare its accuracy with existing methods. Experimental
investigation using a realistic composite plate is made to further validate the proposed method. The influence of damage
location and the number of participating sensors on the performance of the proposed method is discussed. Results indi-
cate that the proposed method yields more accurate and reliable results comparing with existing methods.

Keywords
Bayesian method, Lamb wave imaging, delamination, damage localization

Introduction Based on the change of these properties, the damage

Delamination is among the most critical damage modes
in fiber-reinforced composite laminates, which can
result in catastrophic failure of the component without
much prior notification.1 Therefore, fiber-reinforced
composite laminates are often over-dimensioned or
subjected to periodic non-destructive testing (NDT).
However, a reliable and efficient delamination detec-
tion is still a challenging problem despite tremendous
progress has been made during the past decades.2 As
one of the important guided ultrasonic waves, Lamb
wave has been proven to be a promising candidate in
the application of non-destructive evaluation (NDE).3–6
The Lamb wave technique has outstanding advantages
of strong penetration and minimal attenuation over a
long distance, and it can be used to detect various types
of damages (delamination, debonding, crack, etc.).7–12
For damage localization, piezoelectric transducers
such as actuators and sensors are usually attached on
the surface of a structure to form a transducer net-
work.13–15 When Lamb waves excited by an actuator
pass through the damage area, part of waves will scat-
ter around the edge of the damage and can be received
by all the remaining sensors. The damage alters the
wave propagation and changes the wave properties.
state can be inferred. Giridhara et al.16 proposed a
damage imaging method based on the symmetry of
neighborhood sensor path and the similarity of signal
patterns. The method uses information of the Lamb
wave propagation along with a triangulation scheme to
locate and quantify the damage. Zhou et al.17 devel-
oped a probability-based diagnostic imaging approach
based on the established correlation between extracted
signal features and damage parameters such as shape,
size, location, and orientation. This method relies on
enhancive signal features including both the signal
intensity and temporal information. Kudela et al.18
proposed a strategy of Lamb wave focusing to increase
the damage imaging resolution. Signals from healthy
1
School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing,
China
2
Beijing Advanced Discipline Center for Unmanned Aircraft System,
Beihang University, Beijing, China
3
Graduate School of China Academy of Engineering Physics, Beijing,
China
Corresponding author:
Jingjing He, School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang
University, No.37, Xueyuan Road, Beijing 100083, China.
Email: hejingjing@buaa.edu.cn
2 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
and damaged states are recorded first, and the scattered
waves can be obtained by subtracting the damage wave
signal from the health one in time domain. The scat-
tered waves contain the information of damage features
such as time-of-flight (ToF), which is defined as the
wave traveling time along the actuator–damage–sensor
path. The use of ToF extracted from the scattered
waves has been reported in several studies for damage
localization. Tua et al.19 constructed a set of determi-
nistic non-linear ellipse equations to obtain the coordi-
nates of the damage. The damage location is
determined by the intersection of at least three ellipses.
This method is referred to the elliptical loci method
hereafter. Moll et al.20 generalized the common ellipti-
cal loci method for damage localization in isotropic
plates. The authors combined the wave velocity profile
with elliptic equations to form ellipse-like loci, enhan-
cing the probability of detection. Although the elliptical
loci method has been widely used for damage localiza-
tion,20–22 there still exist some limitations for this
method. One of the difficulties is that the elliptical loci
method has blind zones because the location and/or the
type of a damage may cause the damage to be invisible
to the primary actuator–sensor pairs.19 To overcome
this difficulty, more PZT sensors are needed to generate
more elliptical loci for a precise damage localization.
Another difficulty is that the intersection of ellipses
could occur at other locations rather than the actual
damage location, which can lower the location intensity
in the resulting image and lead to an inaccurate locali-
zation result. Ihn and Chang23 further extended the
elliptical loci method to improve the resolution without
increasing the number of sensors. In their approach, all
the scattered signals from the actuator–sensor path are
delayed and summed for each of the grid points on the
target plate. It provides the imaging where the point
with a larger pixel value represents a greater likelihood
of damage occurring at this point. However, solving
the blind zone problem without adding more sensors
remains a great challenge. This is due to the fact that,
when the damage is located on the direct path between
two PZT sensors, the ToF from the scattered signal is
not large enough to be effectively extracted for the
elliptical loci method. In this case, other features such
as correlation coefficient and amplitude may be alter-
native ones for damage localization since these features
do not suffer the time resolution issue.16 Zhao et al.24
introduced a reconstruction algorithm for probabilistic
inspection of defects (RAPID) to improve the damage
localization performance. The RAPID method is com-
posed of the following two steps: signal comparison
and image reconstruction. The part of signal compari-
son step utilizes the damage index known as the signal
correlation coefficient, which measures the difference
between the signal of a damaged specimen and that of
a healthy one. The damage indexes for all sensor pairs
are spatially distributed and summed to generate an
image of the damage area. Lots of efforts have been
devoted to extend the RAPID method for different
application scenarios,25–27 and potential limitations of
the RAPID method have also been discussed.19,28 One
limitation of the RAPID is that, the correlation coeffi-
cient can decrease greatly by the scattered wave if the
sensing path is close to the damage. Conversely, the
correlation coefficient can yield a value of 1 if the sen-
sing path is very distant from the damage. Therefore,
the accuracy and resolution of the RAPID method are
highly dependent on the density of the sensor array.28
Furthermore, the scaling parameter in the RAPID
method controlling the resolution of the resulting
image is an empirical parameter need to be tuned case
by case.
In general, the sensitivity and resolution of existing
tomography techniques—including both elliptical loci
method and the RAPID method, and their variants—
depend on the density and arrangement of the sensor
array. Each of the methods when applied individually
has its own advantages and limitations. Therefore, a
method which can enhance the sensitivity and resolu-
tion of the damage imaging while reducing these afore-
mentioned limitations is highly demanded. Motivated
by this goal, the aim of this study is to develop a reli-
able and robust method for composite damage localiza-
tion and imaging. The proposed method is based on
the probabilistic integration of the ideas of the elliptical
loci and the RAPID in a Bayesian framework. The
remainder of the study is organized as follows. First,
the methodology development is presented. Two dam-
age features and the procedure of extracting the two
features from Lamb wave data are introduced. The
basic idea of the elliptical loci method and the RAPID
method is briefly discussed. The Bayesian probabilistic
fusion integrating the two methods with the two fea-
tures is developed to obtain the probabilistic density
function of the damage location. Next, numerical stud-
ies are performed to demonstrate and verify the effec-
tiveness of the proposed method. Comparisons with
the existing two methods are made under different
combinations of the damage location and the number
of sensors. Following that, experimental investigation
is carried out with a realistic composite plate to further
validate the performance of the proposed methods.
Finally, conclusions are drawn based on this study.
Methodology development
A two-component hierarchical damage identification
method is proposed by combining the advantages of
the elliptical loci method and the RAPID method in a
Huo et al.
Scattered
signal
Continuous Wavelet Transform
Time of flight
Elliptical Loci
Method
Np
1 [Ti Ti TH ( xd yd )]2
p ( D | θ) exp
i 1 2 2 2
Likelihood
function
Bayesian estimation
p(θ | D)
Fitted normal PDF for
damage imaging
Figure 1. The overall diagram of the proposed damage detection framework.
Bayesian framework. As shown in Figure 1, the basic
idea of the proposed method is centered on the prob-
abilistic integration of the initial prior result from the
RAPID method and the likelihood function con-
structed using the elliptical loci method. The probabil-
istic integration is made in the Bayesian framework to
formulate the posterior distribution of the damage
position parameter u for a given set of measured data
D, and improve the accuracy and effectiveness of the
damage detection. It is worth mentioning that the
developed framework is not limited to combining the
elliptical loci and RAPID methods, and it provides a
general treatment when multiple damage detection and
localization methods are available. Sequential and
simultaneous updating can be made to incorporate
those methods through the Bayesian framework.
Damage features
The damage features used in the proposed method con-
sist of the signal difference and the temporal delay of
the scattered wave. The two features are used in the
components of prior and likelihood construction using
the RAPID-based and the elliptical loci–based compo-
nents, respectively. The signal difference is represented
by the correlation coefficient in a proper time window.
Following that, the damage distribution probability is
expressed as a linear summation of all the signal differ-
ences caused by the damage through the RAPID
method. The temporal delay of the scattered wave is
3
Damage/Baseline
signals
Time-windowing
Correlation
coefficient
RAPID
Method
Np
1 Ri ( xd , yd )
p (θ) (1 i )
Np i 1 1
Prior PDF of θ
p(D | θ) p(θ)
MCMC
obtained by subtracting the signal of a damage state
from that of a healthy (intact) state. The Continuous
Wavelet Transformation (CWT) is used to evaluate the
wave packet of the instantaneous frequency of the sig-
nal. The temporal delay in terms of the ToF of the scat-
tered Lamb waves is calculated by comparing the
excitation signal and the CWT result. The TOF mea-
surement plays an important role in the damage locali-
zation results. The uncertainties of ToF are a function
of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and depending on the
method used in ToF measurement. Detailed discussion
and method for uncertainties associated with TOF can
be found in the literature.29–31 The elliptical loci method
is subsequently employed to construct an ellipse using
the extracted ToF with the two transducer locations as
foci.
Elliptical loci method
The key step of the elliptical loci method for the detec-
tion of damages in plates is the ToF analysis of Lamb
wave propagation and reflection. Consider the pitch–
catch configuration with an actuator P1 and a receiver
P3 attached on a plate as shown in Figure 2.
The existence of a damage alters the wave traveling
from P1 to P3 by reflection. The wave packages
received by P3 include the component of the direct tra-
veling from P1 to P3 in the shortest path denoted as
das , and the delayed component traveling first from P1
to the damage denoted as dad and then from the
4 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)

Figure 3. Illustration of the elliptical distribution function of

the RAPID algorithm.

function centered at the theoretical ToF (TiTH ), as

Figure 2. Description of damage localization based on the shown in equation (2)
elliptical loci method.
  TH 
Ti ðx, yÞ  Ti 
Np
X
pðx, yÞ = exp  ð2Þ
damage to P3 denoted as dds . The total distance of i=1
t0
dad + dds can be estimated given the traveling times from
where Np is the total number of transducer paths, Ti is
the received signal and a constant velocity of wave pro-
the extracted ToF from the scattered signal, and t0 is a
pagation. The locus of the possible damage locations
decay factor which is set as 0.01 ms in this study. The
forms an ellipse with P1 and P3 as the foci and can be
predicted most probable damage location is considered
expressed as
as the point with the maximum value of p(x, y).
dad + dds = ToF  vg
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
RAPID method
, ðxd  xa Þ2 + ðyd  ya Þ2 + ðxs  xd Þ2 + ðys  yd Þ2
The RAPID method is based on the physical intuition
= ToF  vg that a damage on the direct path of an actuator and a
ð1Þ transducer can produce the most significant change,
and the amplitude of the change decreases as the dis-
where (xd , yd ) is the damage coordinate. The coordi- tance between the damage and the direct wave path
nates of the actuator and the receiver are (xa , ya ) and increases.24 The damage location can affect the change
(xs , ys ), respectively. The term vg is the group velocity of associated with each of the sensor pairs, and the actual
the Lamb wave, which depends on the product of the location of the damage can be expressed as a linear
frequency and the thickness. The ToF is defined as the summation of the effects of all participating sensor
time lag from the moment when a receiver catches the pairs. Based on this concept, a linearly decreasing ellip-
damage-reflected signal to the moment when an actua- tical distribution is assumed as shown in Figure 3. The
tor generates the excitation signal. However, there exist correlation coefficient is employed as a damage sensi-
infinite combinations of dad and dds for a given dad + dds tive feature in the RAPID method. The correlation
due to the unknown position of the damage. To identify coefficient r is given by equation (3)
the exact location of the damage from the infinite solu-
tion provided by one elliptical locus, multiple actuator– P
K  
receiver pairs at different locations are required. Each ðXk  mx Þ Yk  my
k =1
of the sensor pairs produces one ellipse and the intersec- r = sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð3Þ
tions of all the loci provide an estimated location of the PK PK  2
2
ðXk  mx Þ  Yk  my
damage. A minimum of three ellipses is required to pro- k =1 k =1
vide an estimation of the damage location.19
To achieve probabilistic localization imaging using where Xk and Yk are the baseline data and the inspec-
the elliptical loci method, discretization of the inspec- tion data, respectively. The baseline data are usually
tion surface is needed. The composite plate can be uni- obtained from the intact plate, and the inspection data
formly divided into several grids.32 Assuming each are obtained at the actual target plate for damage
node of the grids in the composite plate is a possible detection. The term m is the mean of the corresponding
damage location, a damage index p(x, y) at each node data and K is the number of recorded points of the
(x, y) can be defined using a symmetric exponential data. In theory, a smaller the correlation coefficient
Huo et al. 5

value indicates a higher possibility that the damage methods in a Bayesian framework. The idea is to use
exists in the target. The correlation coefficient will be the estimated distribution of the damage location
close to 1 if the two signals are identical by definition. using RAPID as the prior distribution. In addition,
For a given actuator–receiver pair, the spatial distri- based on the elliptical loci method, a likelihood func-
bution of the damage acts as a weighting function in a tion can be formulated using the difference between
linearly decreasing elliptical pattern with the foci the measured location and the theoretical prediction.
located at the two sensors. The target is meshed into In this manner, the posterior distribution of the
uniformly distributed grids and the probability of the uncertain parameters can be obtained given the mea-
existence of a damage at each grid is estimated. surement data using the Bayes rule.34 Denote the
Denoting Np as the number of participating sensing variable describing the difference between the theore-
paths, the probability of the presence of the damage at tical prediction of the location and the measured
position (x, y) can be written as location as e. The probabilistic description of the
measured ToF for the ith actuator–receiver path Ti
N can be expressed as
1 1 X p
b  Ri ðx, yÞ
Prðx, yÞ = Pri ðx, yÞ = ð1  r i Þ ð4Þ
Np Np i = 1 b1
Ti = TiTH ðxd , yd Þ + e ð7Þ
where Pri (x, y), i = 1, 2, . . . , Np is the damage prob-
where TiTH (xd , yd ) is the theoretical calculated ToF
ability distribution of ith sensor pair, and ri is the
using equation (1) with the damage location parameters
correlation coefficient given by equation (3). The last
(xd , yd ).
term on the right-hand side of equation (4),
Denote the uncertain parameters as a vector
(b  Ri (x, y))=(b  1), is the spatial distribution func-
u = (xd , yd , s) and the measured ToF data as
tion of ith path, with its contour in the shape of an
D = (T1 , T2 , . . . , TNp ), where Np is the total number of
ellipse, as shown in Figure 3. The term b is a scaling
transducer paths. Without loss of generality, the error
parameter which controls the size of RAPID distribu-
variable e is assumed to follow a zero mean normal dis-
tion area. The term Ri (x, y) is given as
tribution with a standard deviation of s. The likelihood
 function of the measured data can be written as
RDi ðx, yÞ, when RDi ðx, yÞ\b
Ri ðx, yÞ = ð5Þ 8 N 9
b, when RDi ðx, yÞ ø b
>
> Pp  2 >
YNp >
< Ti  Ti ðxd , yd Þ >
TH >
=
where RDi (x, y) is defined as 1 i=1
pðDjuÞ = pffiffiffiffiffiffi exp 
qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi i = 1 2p s
>
> 2s2 >
>
>
: >
;
ðx  xai Þ2 + ðy  yai Þ2 + ðx  xsi Þ2 + ðy  ysi Þ2
RDi ðx, yÞ = qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
ðxsi  xai Þ2 + ðysi  yai Þ2
ð8Þ

ð6Þ Using the Bayes rule, the posterior probability

density function (PDF) of the parameter vector writes
where (xai , yai ) and (xsi , ysi ) are the coordinates of the
actuator and the receiver on the ith path, respectively. pðujDÞ}pðDjuÞpðuÞ ð9Þ
Note that the parameter b is empirically determined on
a case-by-case basis. It has been shown in previous where p(u) is the joint prior PDF of the parameters,
studies that a small scaling parameter reduces the consisting of the PDF of (xd , yd ) obtained by RAPID
affected zone identified by transducer pairs, producing shown in equation (4) and the PDF of s. Without any
a sharp perception. On the contrary, a large scaling prior information on s, the Jeffreys non-informative
parameter enlarges the affected zone, making the per- prior, that is, p(s)}1=s, can be used.35–37 Consider that
ception conservative. In the conventional RAPID, b is (xd , yd ) and s are independent, and the prior PDF of u
usually set around 1.0, but such a treatment is not writes
always suitable for all cases in engineering practice.28,33
N
1 X p
b  Ri ð x d , y d Þ
pðuÞ = ð1  r i Þ ð10Þ
s Np i = 1 b1
Bayesian probabilistic fusion
The uncertainty of the estimated damage position can Substitute equations (8) and (10) into equation (9) to
be reduced by a probabilistic integration of the two obtain the posterior distribution of u
6 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
Table 1. Elastic properties of composite lamina in the numerical study.
E1 (GPa) E2 = E3 (GPa) G12 = G13 (GPa)
128 82 4.7
1
Np
X b  Ri ðxd , yd Þ
pðujDÞ} 1 + N
ð1  r i Þ
s p
i=1
b1
8 Np 
9 ABAQUS software environment. A [45°/245°/0°/90°]s
>
> P 2 >
>
< T i  Ti ð x d , y d Þ >
TH >
=
exp  i = 1
>
> 2s2 >
> surface-mounted piezoelectric transducers with a dia-
>
: >
; meter of 7 mm and a thickness of 0.2 mm are modeled,
It is worth mentioning that the prior distribution of
(xd , yd ) obtained based on the RAPID method already
encodes relevant information about the damage loca-
tion. To estimate the posterior distribution of u, the
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method is used
to draw samples from equation (11). Using the samples,
the posterior of u and subsequent prediction can be
made. Furthermore, other fusion methods—such as
weighted average and its variants—and other data-
driven methods can be used to integrate the two meth-
ods too. The Bayesian is proposed in this study because
it is less subjective, founded on the probability theory,
and no extra assumption needs to be made. Next,
numerical studies are made to investigate the effective-
ness of the proposed method.
Numerical investigation and
demonstration
To demonstrate the proposed method and verify its
effectiveness, numerical studies are performed. The
finite element (FE) method is used to obtain numerical
data of the Lamb wave under different combinations
of damage location and the number of participating
sensors. Using the numerical data, comparisons are
made to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed
method over the existing elliptical loci method and the
RAPID method. It is known that all finite element
models (FEMs) are approximations to the real physical
parts; therefore, its results can only reflect the actual
states of the physical parts to a certain precision. The
purpose of using FEMs is not to replace the actual
experimental data, but is to provide versatile Lamb
wave data under different configurations of the sensors,
for example, the number of sensors, the pitch–catch
paths, for methodology development.
G23 (GPa) n12 = n13 n23 r (kg/m3)
3.44 0.27 0.2 1560
FEM
 A three-dimensional FEM analysis is performed in
ð11Þ
quasi-isotropic composite laminate with a dimension of
450 mm 3 450 mm 3 1.28 mm is considered. Four
and the encastre boundary condition is used. The geo-
metry of the specimen and the configuration of sensors
are illustrated in Figure 4(a). The material properties of
the laminate are listed in Table 1. A circular shape rep-
resentative delamination with a diameter of 40 mm is
modeled at the center of the composite plate (x,
y) = (225, 225) between the first layer (top surface)
and the adjacent second layer of the composite plate. It
should be stressed that if the delamination type of dam-
age is located in the middle plane of the plate, it cannot
be picked up by the A0 mode due to the zero-strain
state of the middle plane.38 The damage is modeled
using a volume split method such that the FE nodes
across the damage surfaces are separated by a small
distance.39,40 Eight-node solid elements with a dimen-
sion of 0.4 mm 3 0.4 mm 3 0.16 mm (side by side by
thickness) are used. A total of eight layers of uniform
elements are built through the thickness, as shown in
Figure 4(b). The excitation signal used in the numerical
study is a 160-kHz narrow-band five-cycle sinusoidal
tone burst modulated by a Hanning window. The exci-
tation signal is introduced to the FE model through
out-of-plane forces acting on the central FE nodes cor-
responding to the positions of the actuators. A total
duration of 500 ms time length is solved using
ABAQUS/Explicit dynamical analysis with a fixed step
size of 1028 s for all the numerical cases.
Signal processing and feature extraction
The scattered signal is obtained by subtracting the
received signal (the damage plate) from the baseline sig-
nal (the intact plate) in time domain. Figure 5(a) pre-
sents an example of the baseline signal and the received
signal for sensing path P1–P2. Figure 5(b) shows the
corresponding scattered signal. To extract the ToF
information, the CWT34 is applied to the scattered sig-
nal, and the result in solid line is shown in Figure 6.
Huo et al.
Figure 4. (a) Schematic diagram of the PZT configuration in FEM and experiment, and (b) the local zoom-in mesh of the plate.
(a)
(b)
Figure 5. Simulation signal from sensing path P1–P2: (a)
baseline and damage signals and (b) scattered wave.
The ToF is calculated as the time difference between
the actuator signal and the first peak of the CWT result
of the scattered signal.
7
Figure 6. ToF evaluation via the scattered wave with CWT for
sensing path P1–P2.
The correlation coefficient describing the difference
of the Lamb wave signals between the baseline signal
and the received signal can be calculated using equation
(3). To focus on the difference associated with damage,
the first wave packets of the baseline signal and the
received signal are used for the calculation of the corre-
lation coefficient. An example of the first wave packets
of the baseline and received signals for the sensing path
P1–P4 is presented in Figure 7.
A total number of six possible sensing paths are
available in the configuration shown in Figure 4.
Therefore, six independent FE runs are performed, and
results are used to obtain the two damage features.
Table 2 summarizes the resulting ToFs of scattered
waves and the correlation coefficients of all the six dif-
ferent actuator–receiver paths.
8 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
Figure 7. The baseline signal and the damage signal of first
wave packet for sensing path P1–P4.
Model prediction and comparison
The group velocity of the generated Lamb wave at a
particular frequency can be verified in an undamaged
specimen by measuring the ToF between two sensors
with a known separation distance. In this study, the
group velocity of A0 mode at the frequency of
0.16 MHz is experimentally obtained as 1538.3 m/s.
The wavelength l of A0 is 9.6 mm, and the ratio of the
wavelength to the diameter of the damage is 0.24. The
damage features in Table 2 are used to obtain the PDF
of the damage location using the Bayesian posterior of
equation (11). The MCMC sampling procedure is per-
formed to generate samples from the Bayesian poster-
ior distribution. In this study, all the initial values of
the uncertain variables to be drawn from the Bayesian
posteriors are obtained using the maximum likelihood
estimator (MLE). In this case, a total number of 60,000
samples of u = (xd , yd , s) are drawn, and the first 10,000
samples are set as the burn-in data. The resulting
50,000 samples are used to approximate the damage
(a)
Figure 8. Histograms of MCMC samples for parameters: (a) x-coordinate (xd) and (b) y-coordinate (yd).
Table 2. Measured ToF of scattered waves and correlation
coefficient (r) for all actuator–receiver paths.
Features P1–P2 P1–P3 P1–P4 P2–P3 P2–P4 P3–P4
ToF (ms) 209.3 209.7 241.6 217.6 209.7 209.4
r 1.00 1.00 0.50 0.92 1.00 1.00
location. The burn-in period of the MCMC chain can
further minimize the influence of the choice of initial
values on the results. Figure 8 presents the histograms
of the estimated position parameters (xd , yd ). Based on
the histograms, a two-dimensional normal distribution
can be constructed to represent the joint PDF of
(xd , yd ). Figure 9(c) presents the result on the identified
location of the damage, where the black circle shows
the actual damage position and the red ellipse shows
the 50% confidence contour representing the predicted
damage location.
Comparisons are made to show the performance of
the proposed method over the existing elliptical loci and
the RAPID methods. With the known group velocity,
the total path length (dad + dds ), consisted of the length
from an actuator to the damage, and the length from
the damage to a receiver can be calculated using equa-
tion (1). The length is used to construct an ellipse with
the locations of the given pair of two sensors as foci in
the elliptical loci method. After that, the probabilistic
imaging of the damage location can be evaluated using
equation (2), and the result is shown in Figure 9(a). The
results of the correlation coefficient shown in Table 2
are used as a damage sensitive feature in RAPID
method and the b is selected to be 1.05. Figure 9(b)
shows the localization results for the RAPID method.
The black circle represents the actual damage position,
and the red circle represents the estimated damage loca-
tion by the proposed method. The central location of
an identified damage (the grid with the highest prob-
ability value for the presence of damage) is marked by
(b)
Huo et al.
(a)
(c)
Figure 9. The probabilistic results of the damage location estimate: (a) the elliptical loci method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c)
the proposed method.
‘‘ + ’’ for both elliptical loci and RAPID methods. It can
be observed from Figure 9 that the proposed method
yields a more accurate result on the damage location
compared to the elliptical loci method and the RAPID
method.
A quick glance at the mathematical form of RAPID
method, equation (4), reveals that the correlation coef-
ficient is the independent variable of the equation, and
RAPID yields symmetric results if the correlation coef-
ficients associated with the two paths P1–P4 and P2–P3
are the same. Ideally, the FEM model for the case is
expected to produce identical results of the Lamb wave
signal data as the two paths are symmetric about the
diagonal of the plate. However, the results shown in
Figure 9(b) are asymmetric, this is due to the simulated
Lamb wave data generate correlation coefficients of
0.50 and 0.92 for the paths P1–P4 and P2–P3, respec-
tively. Consequently, Figure 9(b) is not symmetric. The
anisotropic material properties can cause such a discre-
pancy. In addition, the damage is modeled using the
9
(b)
volume split method, which essentially forms a planar
gap between the two adjacent layers of elements in the
damage region. The use of hexahedron elements can
only approximate the perimeter of the penny-shape
damage using rectangular shapes, such a discrete repre-
sentation of the damage boundary can further enhance
the discrepancy of the two paths. Other factors such as
the element size with respective to the radius of the
damage circle and the time step in the time integration
can also cause the discrepancy. It can be expected that
using a finer mesh or an axial symmetric mesh with
respective to the center of the penny-shape damage can
greatly reduce the difference between the correlation
coefficients associated with the two paths. However,
using a finer mesh for such a dynamical simulation with
a very small time step can make the simulation time
prohibitively long. Considering the FEM-based numer-
ical simulation is not the focus of this study; the current
FEM setup is used to achieve a balance between the
computational demand and the need for methodology
10
(a)
(c)
Figure 10. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case N2: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
development. To investigate the effectiveness of the
proposed method under different damage scenarios,
numerical studies are carried out to evaluate its perfor-
mance under different combinations of the damage
location and the number of sensors.
Case I: effect of damage location. A total of five cases with
different damage locations are investigated to demon-
strate the performance of the proposed method. The
damage size in these cases has the same diameter of
40 mm. Damage localization results for all three meth-
ods (the elliptical loci method, RAPID method, and the
proposed method) are compared and presented in
Figures 10–13. The central coordinates of different
damage locations of all five cases are listed in Table 3.
The results of case N1 are shown in Figure 9. The black
circle represents the actual damage position, and the
red circle represents the estimated damage locations of
Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
(b)
Table 3. Summary of the damage location for different damage
scenarios.
N1 N2 N3 N4 N5
Damage (225, 225) (225, 140) (125, 125) (140, 140) (180, 180)
location
the proposed method. The central location of an identi-
fied damage is marked by ‘‘ + ’’ for both elliptical loci
method and RAPID method. It can be observed from
Figures 10–13 that the proposed method can yield more
accurate damage localization results compared with the
existing methods. In addition, it is noticed that the
elliptical loci method yields multiple damage locations
in all the cases, and the RAPID method also yields two
damage locations for cases N2, N4, and N5. One possi-
ble reason of this effect is that the resolution of the
Huo et al.
(a)
Figure 11. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case N3: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
elliptical method and RAPID method depends on the
number of the sensors as well as the relative symmetry
of the participating sensors with respect to the damage
location. If the damage location is centered on a sym-
metric array of sensors, the intersections resulting from
the array of sensors may yield identical probabilities at
multiple locations of the image, as shown, for example,
in Figure 9(a) and (b).
To quantify the performance in terms of estimation
error, the following error term measuring the deviation
distances in Table 4 is defined
q
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
2
2ffi outperforms the two existing methods.
E= xp  xd + yp  yd
where (xp , yp ) is the predicted damage location, and
(xd , yd ) is the actual damage location. The predicted
damage locations of the three methods are computed
and compared in Table 4. In all the cases, the proposed
method outperforms the existing methods.
11
(b)
(c)
Case II: effect of sensor number. To further investigate the
performance of the proposed method under different
sensor configurations, case studies using six sensors and
eight sensors are performed. The sensor configurations
for the two cases are illustrated in Figure 14.
The results obtained using the elliptical loci method,
RAPID method, and the proposed methods are pre-
sented in Figures 15 and 16, for cases with six and eight
sensors, respectively. It can be observed that although
increasing the number of sensors can reduce the uncer-
tainty and error of the results obtained by the elliptical
loci and the RAPID methods, the proposed method still
ð12Þ
Experimental validation
To further investigate the effectiveness of the proposed
method in realistic applications, experimental studies
using composite laminates are conducted. The influence
12
(a)
(c)
Figure 12. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case N4: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
of the number of sensors and the damage location on
the proposed method and the existing methods is
studied.
Experimental setup
The dimensions of the composite laminate used in
experiment are 450, 450, and 2.56 mm in length, width,
and thickness, respectively. The lay-up of the quasi-
isotropic laminate is [45°/245°/0°/90°]2s. A transducer
network is mounted on the surface of the composite
plate. The diameter and thickness of the PZT transdu-
cer are 7 and 0.5 mm, respectively. An integrated multi-
channel PZT array scanning system41 is used for the
signal excitation and acquisition, as shown in Figure
17. A narrow-band tone burst five-cycle signal is gener-
ated by the system. Previous studies have shown that
the actuation frequency determines the number of
Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
(b)
excited modes and more modes can complicate the sig-
nals received, although the wavelength of the high fre-
quency propagating wave is smaller and more sensitive
to finer damage. However, the high actuation frequency
implies that only a very short time frame can be ana-
lyzed and also limits the distance between the actuator
and sensor.37,42,43 A preliminary test on this composite
plate is performed to choose a proper actuation fre-
quency.15,43 In this study, the actuation frequency is
chosen as 50 kHz in that the signal is dominated by the
A0 mode Lamb wave in this frequency range34,44 with a
measured wave velocity of 1369.1 m/s. The wavelength
l of A0 is 27.4 mm, and the ratio of the wavelength to
the diameter of the damage is 0.69. An added mass with
a size of 40 mm in diameter and 2 mm in height is
bonded to the specimen to represent the delamination
damage.22,23 The added mass is made of copper mate-
rial and weighs 112.6 g. The sampling frequency is
Huo et al. 13

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 13. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case N5: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.

Table 4. Summary of all cases and damage detection results in the numerical case studies.

Case Damage center location (mm) The elliptical loci The RAPID The proposed
Predicted (mm) Error (mm) Predicted (mm) Error (mm) Predicted (mm) Error (mm)

N1 (225, 225) (200, 201)/(250, 249) 35/35 (223, 223) 3 (225, 225) 0
N2 (225, 140) (209, 144)/(215, 162) 16/24 (102, 101)/(350, 100) 129/131 (227, 160) 20
N3 (125, 125) (104, 164)/(144, 148) 44/30 (101, 101) 34 (130, 134) 10
N4 (140, 140) (122, 176)/(167, 136) 40/27 (100, 100)/(350, 350) 57/297 (154, 158) 23
N5 (180, 180) (163, 209)/(205, 166) 34/29 (100, 100)/(350, 350) 113/240 (189, 192) 15

RAPID: reconstruction algorithm for probabilistic inspection of defects.

10 MHz, and a total length of 7000 sampling points is
recorded.
Results of the proposed method
The Lamb wave responses of all transducer paths are
recorded from the intact plate as the baseline signals.
The damage detection using four sensors (with the con-
figuration shown in Figure 4) is demonstrated. Both the
baseline signal from the intact specimen and the dam-
age signal for the sensing path P1–P2 are presented in
Figure 18(a). The corresponding scattered wave signal
is presented in Figure 18(b). The CWT is used to evalu-
ate the wave packet of instantaneous frequency of the
14 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)

Figure 14. Sensor layout of (a) the six-sensor case and (b) the eight-sensor case.

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 15. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods in the six-sensor case: (a) the elliptical
loci method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
Huo et al.
(a)
(c)
Figure 16. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods in the eight-sensor case: (a) the
elliptical loci method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
scattered signal, and the resulting ToF from the scat-
tered wave is obtained as shown in Figure 19.
The first wave packets of the baseline signal and the
damage signal for sensing path P1–P4 are presented in
Figure 20. The correlation coefficient can be evaluated
using the first wave packets by equation (3). Both the
measured ToFs and the calculated correlation coeffi-
cients are obtained and presented in Table 5.
To obtain the results of the proposed method, the
MCMC sampling is performed to draw samples from
the posterior PDF of equation (11). The same setting
for MCMC used in previous numerical study is
adopted. The histograms of the location parameters x
and y are presented in Figure 21(a) and (b), respec-
tively. Figure 21(c) shows the Ergodic mean plot for
convergence diagnosis of the MCMC chain where the
convergence of the estimation is observed.
15
(b)
Comparison with existing methods
The influence of the damage location and sensor num-
ber on the proposed method and the two existing meth-
ods is studied. Comparisons of the proposed method
with the two existing methods are made to demonstrate
the performance of the proposed method.
Case I: effect of damage location. A total of four cases with
different damage locations shown in Table 6 are studied
using the proposed method and the two existing meth-
ods. The results obtained using the three methods are
presented in Figures 22–25 for cases E1–E4, respec-
tively. The prediction errors defined in equation (12)
associated with the three methods are calculated and
compared in Figure 26. It can be seen that the proposed
method yields more accurate and reliable results
16 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)

(a)

Figure 17. The integrated multi-channel PZT array scanning

system and the composite plate with sensors.

compared with the elliptical loci method and the

RAPID method. The two existing methods can yield
multiple results for the damage location shown in
Figures 23(b) and 24(a). (b)
Figure 18. Data of the sensing path P1–P2: (a) baseline and
Case II: effect of sensor number. The influence of the sen- damage signals and (b) scattered wave signal.
sor number on the identification results is further stud-
ied using experimental data. The same sensor
configuration shown in Figure 14 for six- and eight-
sensor cases is adopted. The damage location is (180,
180). Figure 27 presents the results obtained using the
three methods in the case of six sensors. It is noticed in
Figure 27(c) that the proposed method yields an esti-
mation close to the actual location of the damage. The
elliptical loci method also yields a result that is very
close to the actual location of the damage; however,
two locations are reported by the method as shown in
Figure 27(a). Figure 28 presents the results in the case
of eight sensors. The conclusion similar to that of the
six-sensor case can be made. In this case, the elliptical
loci method yields one location for the damage. The
quantified errors shown in Figure 29 indicate that the
proposed method performs more reliably and accu-
rately with different numbers of sensors. Figure 19. ToF of the scattered wave of the sensing path P1–
The aforementioned asymmetric result (e.g. Figure P2.
9(b)) is also signified by the result shown in Figure
22(b). Given that the two paths are symmetric with In this case, the correlation coefficients are 0.994 and
respect to the damage, the actual material anisotropy 0.988 for the paths P1–P4 and P2–P3, respectively.
and inherent non-uniformity can cause the discrepancy. Although the difference is quite small, that is, around
Huo et al. 17

Table 5. Measured ToF of scattered waves and correlation

coefficient (r) for all actuator–sensor paths.

Features P1–P2 P1–P3 P1–P4 P2–P3 P2–P4 P3–P4

ToF (ms) 206.9 263.2 266.1 257.2 267.2 262.5

r 0.999 1 0.994 0.988 1 0.999

Table 6. Summary of the damage location for different damage

scenarios.

E1 E2 E3 E4

Damage (225, 225) (225, 140) (140, 140) (180, 180)

location
Figure 20. The baseline signal and the damage signal of first
wave packet for sensing path P1–P4.

where d is a one-dimensional vector storing the signal

1%, the degree of asymmetry is still obvious, indicating
that the RAPID method is highly sensitive to such a
discrepancy. The realizations of CWT and MCMC in
this study are made using MATLAB built-in functions
‘‘cwt’’ and ‘‘mhsample,’’ respectively. The cwt function
is called with input parameters cwt(d,’amor’,1e7),
sampling points, and the rest two variables are default
parameters. For a 5000-element vector d, the average
running time of cwt function is 0.0513 s (based on 100
repeated runs of cwt) in MATLAB 2018a with an
Intel i7-8565U laptop CPU in Windows 10 64-bit. The
mhsample function is called with a normal proposal

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 21. The MCMC results of (a) x-coordinate, (b) y-coordinate, and (c) the convergence plot.
18 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 22. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case E1: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 23. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case E2: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
Huo et al. 19

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 24. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case E3: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 25. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for case E4: (a) the elliptical loci
method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
20 Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)

Elliptical loci
sampling time for 60,000 samples of (xd , yd , sd ) is
RAPID 1.552 s (based on 100 repeated runs of mhsample) in
200
The proposed method the same environment.
150
Error (mm)

Conclusion
100
This study developed a novel method of damage locali-
zation in composite materials using Lamb waves. The
50
method is centered on a probabilistic integration of the
elliptical loci method and the RAPID method in a
0 Bayesian framework. Two damage features, namely,
E1 E2 E3 E4
the ToF of the scattered wave signal and the correla-
Case Number
tion coefficient are employed, and the posterior of the
Figure 26. Comparison of the errors associated with the
PDF of the damage location is obtained using the
proposed method and the two existing methods. Bayes rule. Numerical studies are performed to demon-
strate and verify the effectiveness of the model under
different combinations of the damage location and the
number of sensors. To further validate the performance
distribution with standard deviations of 10, 10, and
of the proposed method in realistic applications, an
0.02 for xd , yd , and s, respectively. The average
experimental investigation is made using a composite

(a) (b)

(c)

Figure 27. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for six-sensor case: (a) the elliptical
loci method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
Huo et al.
(a)
(c)
Figure 28. Comparisons of the damage localization results obtained using different methods for eight-sensor case: (a) the elliptical
loci method, (b) the RAPID method, and (c) the proposed method.
Figure 29. Comparison of the errors associated with the
proposed method and the two existing methods under different
numbers of participating sensors.
plate and PZT sensors. The influence of the damage
location and the number of participating sensors on the
21
(b)
performance of the method is studied. Comparisons
are made using the proposed method and the two exist-
ing methods (the elliptical loci method and the RAPID
method) in both numerical and experimental case stud-
ies. Results indicate that the proposed method can yield
more accurate and reliable localization results com-
pared with the two existing methods. Based on this
study, the following conclusions are drawn:
1. The proposed method provides a viable approach
to probabilistic integration for multiple damage
features. More independent damage features can
be integrated into the framework.
2. The proposed method outperforms the existing
elliptical loci method and the RAPID method in
the current numerical and experimental case stud-
ies. The influence of the damage location and the
number of sensors on the proposed method is less
significant than that on the two existing methods.
22
3. The proposed method provides a more reliable
solution to damage identification when the number
of available sensors is limited. The existing meth-
ods depend highly on a dense array of sensors to
achieve accurate results.
It should be noted that RAPID method is sensitive
to the damage feature, that is, correlation coefficient.
For highly anisotropic composite plates, the anisotropic
material properties may have a great influence on the
correlation coefficient and can result in unreliable
RAPID estimation. In addition, the delamination in
the experimental study is modeled by the added masses
due to the limitation of the fabrication, which is an
approximation of the delamination for the purpose of
methodology development and validation. Another
important factor this study does not cover is the time-
dependent degradation of the PZT patches and its bond
to the structure. It is known that the permanent bonds
can deteriorate over time and affect the performance of
the PZT sensors. The sensitivity of the method with
respective to the degree of anisotropy, the validation
using actual delamination damages, and the perfor-
mance of the method under the time-dependent degra-
dation of the sensors and bonds will be studied in the
future work. The current experimental study is based
on a composite plate in the lab environment. The proof
of concept verification for actual applications should be
made using more complex composite structures having
planar and non-planar surfaces, different levels of
orthotropy or anisotropy, and multiple damage states
under the conditions subject to possible vibrations and
loads. Such investigation will be studied in the future.
Acknowledgements
The support is gratefully acknowledged. The authors thank
the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial sup-
port for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article: This study was supported by the National Natural
Science Foundation of China (no. 11872088) and the Science
Challenge Project (No. TZ2018007).
ORCID iD
Jingjing He https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2236-254X
Structural Health Monitoring 00(0)
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