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Issues that prevent Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) based on Guided Waves (GW) from being a part of today’s monitoring solutions in industry are not all obvious to the scientific community. To uncover and overcome these issues, scientists working on SHM and GW problems joined in an expert committee under the patronage of the German Society for Non-Destructive Testing. An initiated online survey among more than 700 experts and users reveals the hurdles hindering the practical application of GWbased SHM. Firstly, methods for proof of reliability of SHM approaches are missing.
Secondly, detailed understanding of phenomenological described wave-damage interactions is needed. Additionally, there are significant unsolved implementation issues and unsolved problems of signal processing including handling of environmental influences.
To enable substantial proof of reliability without unaffordable experimental effort also efficient simulation tools including realistic damage interaction are needed, enabling the joint use of experimental and simulated data to predict the capabilities of the Monitoring system. Considering these issues, the committee focusses on simulation, signal processing, as well as probability of detection and standardization. In the presented work, recent activities of the expert committee starting with survey results are summarized. An open access data basis of life-like measurements is presented to allow testing and comparison of signal processing and simulation algorithms. Finally, a strategy for efficient proof of reliability increasing the acceptance of SHM in industry and for successful Integration of SHM into real-world engineering structures is proposed.
Non-destructive testing (NDT) is a major contributor to the safe railway operation. Even though NDT reliability in railway maintenance is affected by human factors, there are only just a few studies published in this field so far. Education and training of the NDT personnel are some of the most important drivers of safe and reliable NDT. Continuously improving current practices and tools used for educational purposes can be achieved not only through technical content, but also through the attention to human factors. The aim of this study was to deepen the understanding of possible human-related risks in the manual ultrasonic inspection of the hollow railway axles and to suggest measures to improve the education and training of the NDT personnel. This was achieved by means of Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) carried out with eight NDT experts and by a survey of 27 experienced inspectors. The results show that failures can happen throughout the entire NDT process. Prevention of those failures could be improved through the optimization of the organization, technology, documentation and regulations, working conditions and the general process, and through the optimization of the formal education and training. Specialized training of the executives, extended training of the supervisors and the inspectors and improvement of the inspection documentation have been suggested. The study also showed potential for the improvements of the inspection in the field.
The closure of underground nuclear waste disposal facilities requires reliable gas- and watertight engineered barriers. In Germany, barriers made from salt concrete have been evaluated in full scale. While the barriers seem to fulfill the requirements regarding permeability, some unexpected cracks have been detected at the surface and at depth. In cooperation between the Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE) and the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), several experiments have been carried out to evaluate the applicability for ultrasonic measurements in crack detection and general quality assurance. Both commercial instruments and specially developed devices have been tested on site. Using commercial ultrasonic echo devices designed for concrete inspection it was possible to detect cracks and object in salt concrete up to a depth of 2 m. The check for delamination in shotcrete is another field of application. A unique device available at BAM, the wide aperture, deep penetration instrument LAUS, was able to locate cracks and objects up to a depth of 8 m so far, which is thought to be a record for ultrasonic echo measurements in concrete. Adapted imaging procedures, partly adopted from geophysics, helped to reveal 3D structure at depth. In addition, we have developed ultrasonic probes to be deployed in boreholes, currently at up to 20 m depth. They can collect information on cracks and other features in a radius of about 1.5 m around the borehole in the current version and might be used in echo or transmission mode. Evaluation experiments have been performed at an experimental barrier at the ERAM site in Morsleben, Germany. The results showed several empty and injected cracks as well as built in instrumentation. The results have been verified using borehole endoscopy as well as core examination and will be used to set up a reliable quality assurance system for engineered barriers. All instruments are based on ultrasonic shear wave transducers with a frequency range between 25 kHz and 100 kHz. Current research focuses on the improvement of the hardware (e. g. optimization of array characteristics) and imaging techniques as Reverse Time Migration, both aiming at the improvement of depth of penetration, resolution and probability of detection.
Structural health monitoring (SHM) is a term that groups together techniques adopted to evaluate in a continued fashion the structural integrity and degradation of technical appliances. SHM is particularly attractive for components that are difficult to access or expensive to take off-line. Among many other techniques, SHM can be performed using ultrasonic guided waves (UGW) which have an advantage of traveling over Long distances. Various guided wave modes exist along with many methods for their generation and sensing, e.g by means of interdigital transducers (IDT). This contribution is dedicated to the design and characterization of a flexible piezopolymerbased IDT which allows for the selective excitation of UGW, resulting in more straightforward data analysis. The designed IDT was characterized using a 3D Laser Doppler Vibrometer (3D LDV) in the air to identify and analyze the IDT’s Vibration modes. Then the transducer was mounted on an aluminum plate, and the generated wavefield was measured with the 3D LDV.
According to this investigation, we demonstrate that it is possible to selectively excite desired guided wave mode, namely the A0 mode, suppressing the excitation of the S0 mode. Moreover, the measured wavefield allows for analysis of the directivity of the designed IDT. All in all the results show good correlation between theoretical predictions and measured values, thus allowing to use the current design in terms of selective excitation as it is.
That human factors (HF) affect the reliability of NDT is not novelty. Still, when it comes to reliability assessments, the role of people is often neglected. Reliability is typically expressed in terms of POD curves, and the effects of human and organisational factors on the inspection are typically tackled by the regulations, procedures and by the qualification and training of the inspection personnel. However, studies have shown that even the most experienced personnel can make mistakes and that the reliability in the field is never as high as the reliability measured in the POD experiments. Generally, HF are considered too unpredictable and too uncontrollable to model. If that is the fact, then what can we do? The engineering perspective to this problem has often been to find ways to automate inspections and, recently, to make use of artificial intelligence tools to decrease the direct effect of people on the inspection results and improve the overall efficiency and reliability. However, despite automation and AI, people remain the key players, though their tasks change. The contemporary approach to HF is not to engineer them out of the system but to design human-machine systems that make the best use of both. In this talk, ways of tackling HF in the design of systems and processes will be presented.
Lamb waves are a common tool in the field of non-destructive testing and are widely used for material characterisation. Further, the increasing computational capability of modern systems enables the Simulation of complex and detailed material models. This work demonstrates the possibility of simulating an adhesive-bonded multilayer system by characterising each layer individually, and introduces an Approach for determining the dispersive behaviour of acoustic waves in a multilayer system via real measurements.
Approaches to the development of a (GUM-) measurement model for the calculation of measurement uncertainties in the localization of tendons in concrete structures using the ultrasonic echo method including demonstration were presented.