Adhesively bonded composite joints can develop voids and porosity during fabrication, leading to stress concentration and a reduced load-carrying capacity. Hence, adhesive porosity analysis during the fabrication is crucial to ensure the required quality and reliability. Ultrasonic-guided wave (UGW)-based techniques without advanced signal processing often provide low-resolution imaging and can be ineffective for detecting small-size defects. This article proposes a damage imaging process for adhesive porosity analysis of bonded composite plates using UGWs measured by scanning laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV). To implement this approach, a piezoelectric transducer is mounted on the composite joint specimen to generate UGWs, which are measured over a densely sampled area. The signals obtained from the scan are processed using the proposed signal processing in different domains. Through the utilization of filter banks in frequency and wavenumber domains, along with the root-mean-square calculation of filtered signals, damage images of the adhesive region are obtained. It has been observed that different filters provide information related to different void sizes. Combining all the images reconstructed by filters, a final image is obtained which contains damages of various sizes. The images obtained by the proposed method are verified by radiography results and the porosity analysis is presented. The results indicate that the proposed methodology can detect the pores with the smallest detectable pore area of 2.41 mm^2, corresponding to a radius of 0.88 mm, with an overall tendency to overestimate the pore size by an average of 11%.
This paper presents an automatic damage imaging technique by employing a signal processing approach based on applying hierarchically clustered filters across different domains. The technique involves time-frequency-wavenumber filter banks which are applied sequentially to ultrasonic guided wave (UGW) data. The study is conducted for a single lap joint composite specimen with a special focus on small voids which were formed due to manual adhesive component mixing. UGW data are acquired with a 3D Scanning Laser Doppler Vibrometer (LDV) over the scan area of the bonded plate. UGWs are excited at the central frequency of 100 kHz by a single piezoelectric transducer mounted on the surface of the single plate. Within each domain of time, frequency, and wavenumber, four filters are designed which results in 64 distinct filtered wavefields. From each filtered wavefield, an image is obtained by using root-mean-square (RMS) calculation of the signals. The obtained results are then combined to create a final, improved-resolution image of the scan area. The final image is compared to the image obtained through RMS calculation of full wavefield with interpolation through Delaunay triangulation and the image obtained by X-ray radiography. The results show that the smallest void that could be detected has a diameter of 2.14 mm.