Enhanced probabilistic damage localization for composite plate based on joint recurrence plots

Localizing damage is a key aspect of monitoring composite laminate structural health. To address the problem of generating the damage index (DI) of composite laminates using Lamb waves, a reconstruction approach for probabilistic damage inspection (RAPID) based on joint recurrence plots (JRP) was proposed. First, the dynamics of the Lamb wave signals are analyzed using phase space reconstruction. Second, the damage information in each sensing path is represented using JRP, and the DI based on the JRP is built with variational auto-encoder (VAE). Finally, the relative magnitude of the DI was employed to modify RAPID’s weight distribution function, allowing for composite plate damage localization detection. The findings of finite element modeling and experiment data reveal that the approach can achieve accurate localization imaging of the composite plate’s interior damage while also properly identifying the damage under 20 dB and 10 dB noise interference. The approach does not require an understanding of Lamb wave dispersion characteristics and involve the extraction of complicated wave packet signals, making it promising for structural health monitoring based on damage index.