Peri-Ultrasound Modeling to Investigate the Performance of Different Nonlinear Ultrasonic Techniques for Damage Monitoring in Plate Structures

Peri-ultrasound modeling which is based on nonlocal peridynamics is found and proven to be effective for modeling nonlinear waves propagating and interacting with damages in structures. This work presents the peri-ultrasound modeling to investigate the performance of three commonly used nonlinear ultrasonic (NLU) techniques - wave mixing, higher harmonic generation (HHG), and sideband peak count-index (or SPC-I) for monitoring damages (or cracks) in three-dimensional (3D) plate structures. Cracks can be defined as "thin cracks" and "thick cracks" according to the horizon size mentioned in peridynamics. Peri-ultrasound modeling results reveal that the SPC-I results are consistent with other reported numerical modeling and experimental results available in the literature. However, the modulation indicator (MI) from the wave mixing model only shows consistent trends for thin cracks but not for thick cracks and its reliability is affected by the initial excitation bandwidth. The relative acoustic nonlinearity factor β from the HHG technique shows consistent trends for thick cracks but not for thin cracks. It can be concluded from the obtained parametric analysis results that the SPC-I technique is more robust and reliable for monitoring damages in engineering structures.