Advanced Signal Processing for Ultrasonic Structural Monitoring of Waveguides, in Bridge Maintenance, Safety Management, Health Monitoring and Informatics

Ultrasonic Guided Waves (UGWs) are a useful tool in those structural health monitoring applications that can benefit from built-in transduction, moderately large inspection ranges and high sensitivity to small flaws. This paper describes a damage detection method, based on wavelet transform and outlier analysis for structural waveguides. The method combines the advantages of UGW inspection with the outcomes of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) that is used for extracting defect-sensitive features that can be combined to perform a multivariate diagnosis of damage. In particular, the DWT is exploited to generate a set of relevant wavelet coefficients to construct a uni-dimensional or multi…