Inclined Crack Quantification of Plate-Like Structures Based on Circular Sensor Array and Lamb Waves

Cracks are one of the most common damages to thin plates. Therefore, rapid and accurate detection of cracks is of great significance in the nondestructive testing of thin plates. Most existing nondestructive testing technologies focus on crack localization rather than the quantification of the crack length and orientation. Therefore, this paper proposes a damage index, considering the wave attenuation during propagation, to quantify the crack length and orientation. Lamb waves are transmitted and received by a circular sensor array. Based on the abnormal reflection of the A0 mode of Lamb waves, the reflections at cracks are extracted by the Hilbert transform. The influence of the crack length and orientation are studied parametrically, and the relations between the proposed damage index and crack length and angle are given based on regression analysis.