Baseline-free methods for early damage diagnosis using nonlinear ultrasound (ARC Discovery Project administered by RMIT University) (2015-2017)

To address the significant limitation of existing non-destructive evaluation techniques in detecting and characterising early damage, this proposal aims to discover the physical nature of self-generated nonlinear waves by structural damage and to explore its potential for an entirely new class of non-destructive evaluation and structural health monitoring techniques. Major applications include baseline-free structural health monitoring technique capable of detecting and quantifying barely-visible impact damage in advanced composite materials, non-destructive evaluation of structures made by additive manufacturing, and detection of hard-to-inspect locations in unitised structures.