Validation of Numerical Wavefield Modelling and Damage Interaction in Complex Composite Structures Using Data from Open Guided Waves

Abstract Ultrasonic Guided waves (UGW) are one of the most promising tools for SHM especially for thin-walled structures like composites by allowing fast inspection of a large area in-service conditions. However, for practical applications a quality assessment is necessary to estimate damage detection capacity and probability of the designed SHM system. Such evaluation of a general overview for an arbitrary structure is limited with experiments due to repetitive wavefield measurements. Validated numerical analysis tools must be used. In this work, validation study for a complex composite structure with Elastodynamic Finite Integration Technique (EFIT) will be presented. As reference model the measurement data coming from the Open Guided Waves Project (OGW) was selected. The dataset consists of measurements for two different cases called local and large stringer debond with additional baseline measurements. Within this contribution this experiment is reproduced by simulation using EFIT. Results show a good match between the experimental and simulated datasets, as the input parameters are fully determined prior to the simulations. The paper motivates further research, for example related to probability of detection analysis and numerical performance of the results.