Guided Wave Damage Imaging of Composite Laminates With Least-Squares Reverse-Time Migration (LSRTM)

A method for adapting least-squares reverse time migration (LSRTM) for ultrasonic guided wave imaging of composite laminates is proposed in this paper. As composites become more widely used in fields such as the aerospace industry, the need for high resolution imaging in structural health monitoring (SHM) and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) is also growing. For instance, delamination is a common problem in composite laminates, which has led to a certain degree of apprehension in the use of composite materials for load-bearing structures. Although the solver-based imaging techniques using conventional reverse time migration (RTM) methods illuminate damage with a wide range of damage-scattering effects, the resulted images do not fully define the damage regions due to the limited data acquisition aperture, sensor density, frequencies/wavelengths, and incompleteness of adjoint reconstruction. Previously, we have derived the LSRTM theory and benchmarked its high-resolution damage imaging performance for isotropic plates. To improve damage imaging in composite laminates, this paper proposes to create an ultrasonic guided wave-based LSRTM method for anisotropic materials. The derivation of the forward modeling operator and the adjoint operator is presented. Numerical case studies were conducted to show the improvement of LSRTM over RTM in mapping damage in composite plates. Multiple damage sites or damage with a complex shape were created in the numerical studies based on Born approximation-based modeling.