NDT&E International 116 (2020) 102277

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NDT and E International

journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ndteint

Efficient Lamb-wave based damage imaging using multiple sparse Bayesian

learning in composite laminates
Han Zhang a, Jiadong Hua b, c, Fei Gao a, b, Jing Lin b, *
a
School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, Beihang University, Xueyuan Road No. 37, Haidian District, Beijing, China
b
Science & Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering Laboratory, Beihang University, Xueyuan Road No. 37, Haidian District, Beijing, China
c
Beijing Advanced Discipline Center for Unmanned Aircraft System, Beihang University, Xueyuan Road No. 37, Haidian District, Beijing, China

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Lamb wave techniques have been widely used for structural health monitoring (SHM) and nondestructive testing
Lamb wave (NDT). To deal with dispersive and multimodal problems of Lamb wave signals, many signal processing methods
Sparse representation have been developed. A spatially distributed array of piezoelectric transducers is generally adopted for both
Multiple sparse Bayesian learning
transmission and reception of Lamb waves. When imaging the damage in composite laminates, it is necessary to
Composite laminates
meet the need of processing array signals with high efficiency. In this paper, the multiple sparse Bayesian
learning (M-SBL) strategy is employed for damage imaging. Multiple residual signals including damage-reflection
waves are decomposed into a sparse matrix of location-based components simultaneously. An appropriate dic­
tionary is designed to match the damage-reflection waves instead of interference waves. The key to success is to
obtain the sparse matrix of weighting coefficients through the M-SBL algorithm. Damage imaging can be ach­
ieved efficiently using the delay-and-sum (DAS) method with sparse coefficients in time-domain. Results from the
experiment in composite laminates demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

1. Introduction as matching pursuit (MP) [21], orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)

Composite materials are widely used in aerospace, transportation
and other fields due to their advantages of high strength and stiffness [1,
2]. However, undesirable damages such as delamination, matrix
cracking and fiber failure may arise during applications [3,4]. Hence,
reliable SHM and NDT techniques are required to ensure the safety of
composite materials.
Lamb wave, ultrasonic guided plate wave, can propagate over long
distances with sensitivity to surface and internal small defects [5]. It has
become a powerful tool in SHM and NDT applications, such as structural
damage identification of wind turbine blades [6,7], detection in pipe
structures [8,9] and damage assessment in composite materials [10,11].
Dispersion and multi-mode are challenges for Lamb-wave based damage
imaging. To deal with complicated Lamb wave signals, many signal
processing techniques have been utilized, including short-time Fourier
transform, Wigner-Ville distribution, wavelet transform [12–14], etc.
Recently, sparse representation has been broadly concerned and suc­
cessfully applied in image processing [15–17], fault diagnosis [18,19],
and so forth. Lamb wave signal could be decomposed into separated
wave components using popular sparse representation algorithms such
[22], basis pursuit (BP) [23] and sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) [24].
Sparse representation is of benefit to the resolution improvement [23].
The resolution problem is frequently encountered when attempting to
detect several closely distributed damages. Another advantage is noise
suppression because the noise energy will spread out due to its mismatch
with dictionary atoms. Tse and Wang [25] used MP for estimating the
axial length of a pipeline defect with an optimized dictionary based on
two interfering reflections. Harley and Moura [26] proposed a fast
sparse wavenumber analysis method based on OMP to recover disper­
sion curves from guided wave data. De Marchi L et al. [27] combined
basis pursuit algorithm and warped frequency transform to extract the
distance traveled by multimodal and dispersive ultrasonic waves. Wu
et al. [28] employed the SBL method to recover multiple modes from
noisy dispersive guided wave signals for defect localization.
MP is a popular greedy iterative algorithm to obtain a sparse solu­
tion. OMP is later proposed based on MP, which improves the conver­
gence of MP by using orthogonal projections [20,29]. However, echoes
in an ultrasonic signal may not be orthogonal [20]. Using the BP algo­
rithm guarantees convergence to the global minimum. The regulariza­
tion parameter involved controls the trade-off between the sparsity of

* Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: zhanghan1@buaa.edu.cn (H. Zhang), huajiadong@buaa.edu.cn (J. Hua), youfeigao@buaa.edu.cn (F. Gao), linjing@buaa.edu.cn (J. Lin).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ndteint.2020.102277
Received 4 January 2020; Received in revised form 12 April 2020; Accepted 13 April 2020
Available online 30 May 2020
0963-8695/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 1. Hanning-windowed tone burst centered at 80 kHz and with a duration
of 5 cycles.
signal separately, and process all the columns one by one, which will
significantly increase the calculation cost and storage space.
To address the above issues, in this paper, the M-SBL strategy is
employed for damage imaging. Firstly, chirp excitation is applied to
achieve narrowband response extraction [40]. From the comparison
between the reference and damaged wave signals, multiple residual
signals can be obtained. Subsequently, an appropriate dictionary is
designed to match the damage-reflection waves so that atoms can be
associated with the location of the damage. Finally, the sparse matrix is
calculated through the M-SBL algorithm. Using the DAS method with
these sparse coefficients in time-domain, efficient imaging of damage
can be achieved.
The organization of this paper is as follows. Theory of Lamb wave
sparse representation is briefly reviewed in Section 2. In Section 3, the
dictionary is designed and the M-SBL method is presented in detail. In
Section 4, an experiment is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the
proposed method. Further discussions are given in Section 5. Several
conclusions are summarized in Section 6.

representation and the residue norm [20,30], and it needs to be deter­

mined by valid methods such as the L-curve method [31,32]. The SBL
strategy retains a desirable property of ℓ0-norm diversity measure while
usually possessing less number of local minima [30]. Besides, all un­
certain model parameters can be estimated solely from the signal and
thus no parameter tuning is required [28]. With the above advantages,
Wu et al. [33] adopted a robust sparse Bayesian learning algorithm
employing the Gabor dictionary for damage detection and localization
on isotropic aluminum plate structures. In this study, the SBL algorithm
is employed for Lamb wave damage imaging.
A commonly proposed configuration for damage localization is a
spatially distributed array of piezoelectric transducers, and an image is
generated to display the location of the damage [34–36]. Each trans­
ducer sends out designed waves in turn, and responses are recorded by
the remaining ones [37], which means that it is preferable to analyze
multiple signals from all paths simultaneously to realize high efficiency.
Exciting multiple transmitters simultaneously is another way to improve
efficiency [38]. The signals received by different transmitters are sepa­
rated by matched filtering, and then the separated signals are used for
damage imaging. However, the signal-to-noise ratio of the signals and
imaging performance decreases due to transmitter interference [38]. In
this circumstance, it is necessary to meet the need of solving multiple
measurement vectors (MMV) problems with high efficiency [39]. In the
multiple sparse representation method, MMV are represented as an N �
M matrix, and each column is a signal from a path of the array. Tradi­
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of the transducer array and simulated delamination.
tionally, the solution is to treat each column of the matrix as an N � 1

Fig. 2. Schematic of multiple sparse representation.

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H. Zhang et al.
Fig. 4. Experimental setup.
2. Theory of sparse representation
In Lamb-wave based SHM and NDT applications, the received signal
can be represented as a linear combination of multiple wave components
including direct waves, damage-reflection waves, boundary-reflection
waves, and noise. A generalized expression is given by
X
L
yðtÞ ¼ wi ϕi ðtÞ þ εðtÞ
i¼1
where y(t) is the received signal, wi is the weighting coefficient for the ith
wave component φi(t), and ε(t) is the noise. The received signal can be
rewritten in vector form as
y ¼ Φw þ ε
where y is the vector form of y(t), ε is the noise term, and Φ2ℝ N�L
is a
dictionary matrix consisting of L column vectors (also called atoms). The
atoms are N-dimensional and have unit norm, that is, φi2Φ, φi2ℝN and
||φi||2 ¼ 1. Sparse representation is to seek a sparse vector w2ℝL satis­
fying the relationship in Eq. (2). The sparse assumption of w is reason­
able because the Lamb wave signal is usually comprised of limited
echoes, which implies that most elements of w are zero-valued.
To analyze array signals with high efficiency, the M-SBL method is
employed for damage imaging. Therefore, given M models structurally
equivalent to Eq. (2), the sparse representation expression of MMV
becomes
Y ¼ ΦW þ E
where Y ¼ ½y�1 ; …; y�M �, W ¼ ½w�1 ; …; w�M � and E ¼ ½ε�1 ; …; ε�M �. w�j
represents the jth column of W, and wi� represents the ith row of W. The
form corresponding to Eq. (2) in the single measurement vector (SMV)
can be written as follows
y�j ¼ Φw�j þ ε�j ; j ¼ 1; 2; …; M:
The dictionary design and M-SBL algorithm will be illustrated in
Section 3.
NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277
3. Multiple sparse representation based on Lamb wave array
signals
3.1. Data acquisition
Many Lamb-wave based methods require tone burst excitation to
suppress the effect of dispersion. It is common to acquire data using
multiple frequencies of tone burst. If responses corresponding to mul­
tiple frequencies are measured, it might cause time consuming and data
storage wasting [40]. Therefore, in this paper, a broadband chirp is
utilized to acquire data over a wide frequency range, and deconvolution
is applied to extract specific narrowband response [40].
Assume that two piezoelectric ceramic discs (PZT) are placed on a
composite laminate as the transmitter and receiver, respectively. Use the
chirp signal as excitation and extract the narrowband tone burst
response y(t) at the appropriate center frequency. Choosing the center
frequency involves Lamb wave mode selection. Lamb waves are multi­
modal, which means that there are at least two modes at any frequency.
Both S0 mode and A0 mode have their intrinsic advantages and disad­
vantages for damage detection. Compared with S0 mode, the A0 mode of
Lamb wave can detect thickness varying damage more accurately and is
more suitable to detect damage like delamination in composite lami­
nates [41]. In this study, the simulated damage is delamination, so the
A0 mode is chosen to extract damage-reflection waves from signals,
which means that the amplitude of A0 mode should be much larger than
that of S0 mode in narrowband response. The amplitude modulation
curve in aluminum plates is determined by the plate thickness, the mode
type, and the PZT size [42–44]. In practice, the curve can be both
theoretically derived and experimentally tested [42–44]. Similar to
aluminum specimens, amplitude modulation curves of different modes
in composite laminates could also be derived and tested, and mode
amplitude can be controlled by these frequency-dependent curves. By
choosing an appropriate center frequency, the amplitude of S0 mode can
be small enough to be ignored.
When the propagating wave encounters the damage, it will experi­
(1) ence attenuation, reflection and mode conversion. Ignoring mode con­
version and multiple reflections, the narrowband response includes
direct waves, damage-reflection waves, boundary-reflection waves, and
noise. From the comparison between the reference and damaged wave
signals, a residual signal is obtained. The residual signal for this
transmitter-receiver pair can be written as
(2)
yres ðtÞ ¼ ydamaged ðtÞ yreference ðtÞ
¼y damage reflection
ðtÞ þ eðtÞ: (5)
where e(t) is defined as interference waves including the difference of A0
mode direct waves, the difference of A0 mode boundary-reflection
waves and the difference of noises in two measurements. Because the
phase cannot be perfectly aligned between the reference and damaged
wave signals, the residual signal comprises interference waves in addi­
tion to damage-reflection waves. All wave components other than the
damage-reflection waves used for imaging are considered as interfer­
ence waves in residual signals, and interference waves cannot well
match the dictionary atoms designed to characterize the effective waves.
In MMV model, consider an array with Q transducers on a composite
(3) laminate, which can form P ¼ 0.5 � Q(Q - 1) transmitter-receiver pairs.
After acquiring P sets of reference and damaged signals, the corre­
sponding residual signals are obtained as column vectors in a matrix Y ¼
½yres res res
1 y2 ⋯yP �. This matrix is the processing object using sparse repre­
sentation in the following.
(4) 3.2. Dictionary design
To effectively represent the signal matrix Y, an appropriate dictio­
nary Φ should be carefully designed, which enables to match damage-
reflection waves rather than interference waves. In this paper, tone
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H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 5. (a) 28 residual signals and (b) Corresponding sparse coefficients in time-domain.

burst atoms are employed because tone burst signal is applied to extract duced. In Eq. (2), ε is assumed to be a zero-mean Gaussian vector with
the narrowband response. An n cycle Hanning windowed sinusoid tone precision matrix σ2I. Then the likelihood can be written as
burst with the center frequency fc satisfies � �
� � � N=2 1
� � �� p y�w; σ 2 ¼ 2πσ 2 exp ky Φwk 2
: (7)
2πfc t 2σ 2
ϕðtÞ ¼ 1 cos sin 2fc t: (6)
n
An empirical Bayesian strategy that draws on the concept of auto­
The tone burst with a center frequency of 80 kHz is shown in Fig. 1. matic relevance determination (ARD) is adopted to encourage sparsity
Obviously, the center frequency of atoms should be the same as that of [45,46]. Therefore, a zero-mean Gaussian prior distribution is utilized
the tone burst applied in narrowband response extraction. over w
The tone burst is treated as an atom of the dictionary. The effective
Y
L � �
part of the atom is time-shifted to become other atoms, thereby forming pðwjαÞ ¼ N wi �0; αi 1 (8)
a dictionary matrix. The sparse representation schematic is shown in i¼1
Fig. 2. In this way, atoms can associate with time. Analyzing atoms with
large weighting coefficients can locate the damage-reflection waves. where each hyperparameter αi associates with each weighting coeffi­
cient wi independently. To form the hierarchical prior, hyperprior
should be defined over α [24]. Therefore, α is modeled by the Gamma
3.3. Multiple sparse Bayesian learning
distribution [24,47].
As shown by Tipping research [24], a Bayesian probabilistic frame­ Y
L

work is detailed for solving Eq. (2). This approach ensures that the pðαÞ ¼ Gammaðαi ja; bÞ;
(9)
weighting coefficient vector w is sparse and parameters can be adap­
i¼1
pðβÞ ¼ Gammaðβjc; dÞ;
tively learned from the signal. M-SBL algorithm is utilized here to pro­
cess all the residual signals simultaneously, which greatly improves the with β � σ 2
and where
efficiency of damage imaging.
Before involving MMV, sparse Bayesian learning for SMV is intro­

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H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 6. Reference and damaged signals and corresponding residual signals captured by different transducer pairs: (a) PZT#1-PZT#3 (b) PZT#1-PZT#7 (c) PZT#2-
PZT#6 (d) PZT#4-PZT#8.

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H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 7. Sparse coefficients in time-domain for different paths: (a) PZT#1-PZT#3 (b) PZT#1-PZT#7 (c) PZT#2-PZT#6 (d) PZT#4-PZT#8.

For the first part, the posterior distribution over the weights can be
R
computed analytically since its normalizing integral, pðyjα; σ2 Þ ¼
pðyjw; σ ÞpðwjαÞdw, is a convolution of Gaussions [24]. This procedure
2

involves evidence maximization or type-II maximum likelihood method

[30]. Combining the Gaussian likelihood in Eq. (7) and the Gaussian
prior in Eq. (8), the posterior distribution over the weights becomes
� � pðyjw; σ2 ÞpðwjaÞ
p w�y; α; σ 2 ¼ ¼ N ðμ; ΣÞ (12)
pðyjα; σ2 Þ

where the covariance matrix and mean are respectively [24].

� 1
Σ ¼ σ 2 ΦT Φ þ A ; (13)

μ ¼ σ 2 ΣΦT y; (14)

with A ¼ diag (ɑ ɑ).

For the second part, some approximation should be adopted to
represent the hyperparameter posterior by a delta function at its most
probable values αMP and σ 2MP , which means that pðwjyÞ � pðwjy; αMP ;
Fig. 8. The DAS imaging result. σ 2MP Þ. Therefore, αMP and σ 2MP need to be computed, where
� � � �
αMP ; σ 2MP ¼ argmaxp α; σ 2 �y
Gammaðαja; bÞ ¼ ΓðaÞ 1 ba αa 1 e bα
; (10) � �
¼ argmaxp y�α; σ2 pðαÞp σ 2 :
�
(15)
R∞
with ΓðaÞ ¼ 0 ta 1 e t dt. From Bayes’ rule, the posterior over all un­ For the case of uniform hyperpriors, only pðyjα; σ2 Þ needs to be
knowns can be decomposed as maximized by taking the derivatives of the logarithm of the evidence
� � � � � � function or using evidence maximization (EM) algorithm. After esti­
p w; α; σ2 �y ¼ p w�y; α; σ 2 p α; σ 2 �y : (11)
mating the hyperparameters αMP and σ 2MP , the most credible estimation

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H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 9. The DAS imaging results using S-SBL with different convergence threshold values:
(a) δ ¼ 0.00100 (b) δ ¼ 0.00050 (c) δ ¼ 0.00025 (d) δ ¼ 0.00022 (e) δ ¼ 0.00020.

of w can be obtained which equals the posterior mean μ. � �

� � � 1 � �2
Compared with single sparse Bayesian learning (S-SBL), the M-SBL p y�j �w�j ; σ2 ¼ 2πσ2
N=2
exp �y Φw�j � : (16)
2σ 2 �j
algorithm posits a vector of hyperparameters controlling the prior
variance of each row of W in Eq. (3) instead of associating each Next, assign to the ith row of W a P-dimensional Gaussian prior
weighting coefficient with each hyperparameter [39]. Thus, for each y�j ,
pðwi jγi Þ ¼ N ð0; γi IÞ; (17)
w�j pair, Eq. (7) can be rewritten as
where γi is the priori variance hyperparameter of the ith row of W. Eq.
(8) is equivalent to

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H. Zhang et al. NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277

Fig. 10. The DAS imaging results using M-SBL with different iteration numbers:
(a) k ¼ 50 (b) k ¼ 100 (c) k ¼ 120 (d) k ¼ 150 (e) k ¼ 200.

Table 1 Table 2
Operation time using S-SBL with different convergence threshold values. Operation time using M-SBL with different iteration numbers.
Threshold value δ 0.00100 0.00050 0.00025 0.00022 0.00020 Iteration number k 50 100 120 150 200

Operation time (s) 465.99 637.41 819.57 921.95 944.11 Operation time (s) 48.10 95.76 114.35 144.07 191.86

Y
L and prior, the posterior distribution of the jth column of W like Eq. (12)
pðWjγÞ ¼ pðwi jγ i Þ; (18) becomes
i¼1
� � � �
� � p y�j �w�j p w�j �γ �
where the hyperparameter vector γ ¼ ½γ1 ; …; γL �T . Combining likelihood p w�j �y�j ; γ ¼ � � ¼ N μ�j ; Σ ; (19)
p y�j �γ

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proposed method. The schematic diagram of specimen and transducer

array for damage imaging is shown in Fig. 3. The specimen is a quasi-
isotropic carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) laminate with the di­
mensions of 450 mm � 450 mm � 1.5 mm. Set bottom left corner and
two vertical boundaries of the laminate as the coordinate origin and
axes, respectively. The transducer array of 8 PZTs with a diameter of 7
mm and 0.5 mm in thickness is arranged on the laminate. Delamination
is frequently simulated by bonding masses on the surface of laminate
[48,49]. Circular magnets with a diameter of 25 mm are attached to
both sides of the laminate to simulate damage. As shown in Fig. 3, the
center of the simulated damage is located at (207 mm, 286 mm).
A broadband chirp signal that the frequency sweeps from 10 kHz to
700 kHz over a time duration of 1 ms is generated by a Tektronix AFG
31022 waveform generator. When one of the PZT emits the excitation
chirp, the signal is amplified by an Aigtek ATA-4012 amplifier and other
PZTs act as receivers. Eight transducers make up 28 transducer pairs.
Then reference and damaged wave signals are recorded by a Tektronix
MDO3104 oscilloscope at a sampling frequency of 5 MHz, respectively.
Fig. 11. Propagating tone burst under dispersion.
A photograph of the overall procedure is illustrated in Fig. 4.

with the covariance matrix and mean given by [45]. 4.2. Results

Σ¼Γ T 1
ΓΦ Σy ΦΓ; (20)
Since A0 mode is chosen to detect delamination damage, it is
necessary to find an appropriate center frequency of tone burst from the
M ¼ ½μ�1 ; …; μ�P � ¼ ΓΦT Σy 1 Y; (21) dominant range of A0 mode. To avoid multiple repeated experiments
that only change center frequency, chirp is utilized as excitation. In this
where Γ ¼ diagðγÞ and Σy ¼ σ2 I þ ΦΓΦT . In order to obtain the mean way, tone burst responses of different center frequencies are extracted in
M, an estimate of the hyperparameter vector γ is required. Each unique an experiment, which can improve the signal-to-noise ratio and save
value for γ corresponds to a different hypothesis for the prior distribu­ much time. After analyzing the amplitude modulation curve of the
tion. Thus, determining an appropriate is tantamount to a form of model received signals, the center frequency is determined to be 80 kHz. The
selection. The use of marginalization for hyperparameter optimization amplitude of the S0 mode in this case is small enough to be ignored.
has been proposed in a variety of contexts [45]. The marginal likelihood Therefore, the desired excitation is the tone burst signal as shown in
that results is maximized with respect to γ, leading to the cost function Fig. 1.
Z Residual signals are obtained by subtracting the reference signals
LðγÞ ¼ 2 log pðYjWÞpðWjγÞdW: (22) from the corresponding damaged signals. However, the residual signals
comprise interference waves in addition to damage-reflection waves. 28
where a -2log(⋅) transformation is added for simplicity [45]. After residual signals are decomposed into 28 coefficients vectors in a matrix
minimizing the cost function using EM algorithm, the update rule of γ is simultaneously using the M-SBL approach. Then, each vector is con­
verted into sparse coefficients in time-domain by matching each non-
1
ðnewÞ
γi ¼ kμi� k22 þ Σii ; 8i ¼ 1; …; L (23) zero coefficient with the time of the corresponding atom. Regardless
P
of electromagnetic interference caused by device for about 0.1 ms,
While variance σ2 can be update by sparse coefficients in time-domain corresponding to all residual signals
are obtained, as shown in Fig. 5.
�ðnewÞ 1
kY ΦMk2F
σ2 ¼P : (24) As an example, four groups of the residual signals are shown in Fig. 6
P
L
N L þ Σγiii and corresponding sparse coefficients in time-domain are shown in
i¼1 Fig. 7. It should be mentioned that, theoretical A0 mode wave arrival
Consequently, given residual signal matrix Y and the dictionary Φ, time, i.e. abscissa of the green dotted line, is calculated through dividing
the M-SBL procedure can be summarized by the following collection of the distance between the transmitter and the receiver by the group ve­
steps. locity cg at the center frequency.
According to the location of delamination, the damage-reflection
1) Initialize γ and σ2. waves of A0 mode is shown in the red rectangle in Fig. 6. Large co­
2) Compute covariance matrix Σ and mean M using Eq. (20) and Eq. efficients exist at the corresponding position in Fig. 7. However, the
(21), respectively. interference waves in the green rectangle in Fig. 6 do not correspond to
3) Update γ using Eq. (23) and σ2 using Eq. (24). such large coefficients in Fig. 7, indicating that they only match the
4) Iterate 2) and 3) until γ satisfying custom condition. The weighting atoms to a certain extent. That is to say, using the M-SBL method can
coefficients matrix W equals to Mfinal. effectively reduce the influence of interference waves, while interfer­
ence noises still exist in Figs. 5 and 7.
Through the above calculation, the solution can be obtained and To evaluate the performance of the method in interference sup­
applied to Lamb wave array damage imaging. pression, an index similar to signal-to-noise ratio is calculated by 20lg
(S/N) where S and N represent the absolute peak values of damage-
4. Experimental investigation reflection waves and interference waves, respectively. The calculated
indexes for residual signals in Fig. 6(b) and (c) are 0.44 dB and 2.82
4.1. Procedure dB, respectively. By contrast, the indexes for sparse coefficients in time-
domain in Fig. 7(b) and (c) are 4.90 dB and 8.29 dB, respectively. The
An experiment was conducted to verify the effectiveness of the indexes have increased after using the M-SBL method, which demon­
strates that employing the proposed method can reduce the influence of

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Fig. 12. Residual signals and corresponding sparse coefficients in time-domain for different paths.

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H. Zhang et al.
interference waves.
Damage imaging is conducted using the well-known DAS algorithm
[50]. Pixel value at a particular location (x, y) can be expressed as
� t � are 3.48 dB, 4.67 dB, -0.36 dB and 7.03 dB, respectively. By contrast, the
X
P
di þ dir
Pðx; yÞ ¼ wsi (25)
i¼1
cg
where P is the number of transmitter-receiver pairs and wsi ð ⋅Þ denotes
the sparse coefficients in time-domain specific to the ith transmitter-
receiver pair. Parameters dti and dri are the distances from the trans­
mitter and receiver of the ith path to the pixel (x, y), respectively. The
DAS imaging result processed by the above method is shown in Fig. 8.
In Fig. 8, the red circle indicates the simulated damage location. As
can be seen, the damage is unambiguously detected and accurately
localized with a small localization error. However, sum of these inter­
ference noises from different paths at a certain pixel may happen to be a
large value, that is, imaging artifacts are formed. It demonstrates that
the proposed method is effective for damage imaging in composite
laminates.
5. Discussions
5.1. Comparison to traditional S-SBL algorithm
In order to verify that the M-SBL algorithm can greatly reduce
computation time, the S-SBL algorithm is used to analyze these 28 re­
sidual signals separately and total time is recorded for comparison. For
the sake of facilitating comparison, multiple images are generated by
adjusting the threshold of convergence condition, as shown in Fig. 9. It
aims to find the shortest time when clear results can be�obtained in� two
situations. In this paper, the convergence condition is �γnew γold �∞ <
δ, where δ is the adjusting parameter. As for the M-SBL algorithm,
changing the threshold value is equivalent to changing the iteration
number k. Therefore, by changing the number of iterations to generate
images, the effect of iteration number on damage imaging is explored at
the same time, as shown in Fig. 10. The code was compiled in a work­
station equipped with Intel Core 64-bit CPU’s at 3.60 GHz. The opera­
tion time is shown in Table 1 and Table 2.
It is seen from Figs. 9 and 10 that clear results can be obtained
starting from δ ¼ 0.00022 and k ¼ 120. Thus, the shortest time for S-SBL
is approximately 921.95s while 114.35s for M-SBL. By comparing their
corresponding operation time, it is obvious that using M-SBL approach
takes much less time than S-SBL approach, which can fully illustrate its
high efficiency. In addition, as the number of iterations increases, better
imaging results can be achieved.
5.2. Interference suppression considering Lamb wave dispersion
Previous experimental results show that M-SBL method helps to
achieve interference suppression. To further evaluate interference sup­
pression of M-SBL algorithm, Lamb wave dispersion is considered during
dictionary design.
According to Eq. (5), interference waves contain the difference of A0
mode direct waves, the difference of A0 mode boundary-reflection
waves and the difference of noises in two measurements. If dispersive
characteristic is obvious and non-ignorable, the damage-reflection
waves are dispersive exhibiting regular frequency variation. Different
from that, frequency variation of interference waves acquired by signal
subtraction is irregular. As an example, an experiment is performed on
another specimen with delamination damage, and also 28 dispersive
signals are obtained from an array of 8 PZTs. The specimen is a T300/
3231 16-ply CFRP laminate. Dispersive tone burst atoms propagating as
A0 mode are designed to match dispersive damage-reflection waves, one
of which is shown in Fig. 11. Four groups of residual signals and their
corresponding sparse coefficients in time-domain after M-SBL process­
ing are shown in Fig. 12.
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NDT and E International 116 (2020) 102277
As previously mentioned, an index similar to signal-to-noise ratio is
calculated to quantitatively evaluate the degree of interference sup­
pression. The calculated indexes for residual signals (a), (c), (e) and (g)
indexes for sparse coefficients (b), (d), (f) and (h) are 6.68 dB, 6.46 dB,
8.30 dB and 11.67 dB, respectively. The increase in these index values
illustrates the effectiveness of interference suppression in Fig. 12, and
demonstrates that M-SBL algorithm can achieve interference suppres­
sion of all array signals at the same time under Lamb wave dispersion.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, the M-SBL strategy is employed for Lamb wave damage
imaging. Based on the theoretical and experimental investigation,
several conclusions are drawn as follows.
1) Sparse Bayesian learning for multiple measurement vectors is uti­
lized to satisfy the need of processing array signals with high effi­
ciency in Lamb wave SHM and NDT. After signal processing, damage
imaging can be efficiently achieved in composite laminates.
2) Using the M-SBL algorithm can effectively reduce the influence of
interference waves of all array signals at the same time. Because
interference waves cannot well match the dictionary atoms designed
to characterize the effective waves.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Han Zhang: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Writing -
original draft. Jiadong Hua: Methodology, Software, Validation,
Writing - review & editing, Funding acquisition. Fei Gao: Investigation,
Data curation, Writing - review & editing. Jing Lin: Conceptualization,
Supervision, Resources, Funding acquisition.
Acknowledgement
The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of
China (Grant No. 51805015, 91860205), the National Key Laboratory of
Science and Technology on Reliability and Environmental Engineering
(Grant No. 6142004190502), and the Aerospace Science and Technol­
ogy Foundation, which are highly appreciated by the authors.
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