Damage detection of composite plate using finite element analysis based on structural health monitoring

Delamination in composite structures plays a major role in lowering structural strength and stiffness, consequently downgrading system integrity and reliability. The aim of this paper is to show that Lamb waves may be effectively generated using piezoelectric transducers embedded inside a composite plate for health monitoring application. A Lamb wave-based quantitative identification technique for delamination in VARTM composite structures was established. Propagation of Lamb waves in composite plates was evaluated using dynamic FEM analysis. Then, an experiment is carried out to verify the validity of the analytical study based on finite element models. The study was carried out to assess damages in composite plate by fusing information from multiple sensing paths of the embedded network. It was based on the Hilbert transform, signal correlation and probabilistic searching. The obtained results show that satisfactory detection of defects could be achieved by proposed method.