Passive guided wave tomography for structural health monitoring applications

This manuscript presents a baseline-free quantitative method for the imaging of corrosion flaws present in thin plates. This method only requires an embedded guided waves sensors network in a fully passive way. The field of applications are Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of critical structures with heavy constrains on both sensors intrusiveness and diagnostic reliability. A promising solution allowing to increase the number of measurement points without increasing the intrusiveness of the system is provided by the Fiber Bragg Gratings (FBGs). However, unlike piezoelectric transducers generally used in SHM, the FBGs cannot emit elastic waves. The idea consists in using passive methods in order to retrieve the Green function from elastic diffuse fields - naturally present in structures - measured simultaneously between two sensors. In this manuscript, two passive methods are studied: the ambient noise correlation and the passive inverse filter. It is shown that the latter gives better results when coupled with tomography. Several tomography algorithms are assessed with numerical simulations and then applied to active and passive datasets measured by a PZT network. In order to make passive tomography robust, a time of flight identification method is proposed, based on a time-frequency representation. Finally, a novel experimental demonstration of passive measurements with FBGs only is presented, suggesting high potential for FBGs passive tomography. (author)