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Sensors Based NDE and NDT

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A special issue of Sensors (ISSN 1424-8220). This special issue belongs to the section "Physical Sensors".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 May 2020) | Viewed by 47572

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Prof. Yufeng Zhou

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Guest Editor

Division of Engineering Mechanics, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, College of Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore
Interests: shock wave lithotripsy (SWL); high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU); ultrasound-enhanced drug delivery; nondestructive evaluation (NDE); surface acoustic wave (SAW)

Dr. Wentao Wang

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2125, USA
Interests: structural health monitoring; non-destructive testing/evaluation (NDT/E); surface wave; guided wave (GW); wireless sensor networks (WSNs); compressive sensing (CS); osseointegrated prosthesis monitoring
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Dear Colleagues,

Non-destructive testing/evaluation (NDT/NDE) methods clearly have a significant role in both science and technology for the evaluation of the properties of materials, components, and systems in civil engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, aeronautical engineering, and medical applications. It has gained increasing attention in recent years, mainly because of its high precision and sensitivity without any damage to samples. There are growing needs to monitor samples of materials, components, and systems to more accurately identify whether there is damage, where the damage is, what type it is, and how big the damage is with quantitative data acquired by sensors and 2D/3D images visualized by reconstructed algorithms.

This Special Issue aims to publish highly rated manuscripts presenting the recent developments and applications of original sensor-based NDE and NDT approaches addressed to the study of science and engineering assessment, including sensor design and fabrication, system construction, theoretical simulation, data analysis, reconstruction algorithms, experimental results, and applications. Topics include but are not limited to the keywords listed as follows:

Keywords:

ultrasound
surface acoustic wave and guided wave
new developments in smart sensors
novel intelligent sensing-based NDT/E approaches
distributed wireless sensor networks
reconstruction algorithm of NDT/E
damage detection and visualization
theoretical simulation of wave propagation and interaction
artificial intelligence in the data analysis and damage prediction
industrial applications and evaluation
clinical non-destructive evaluations

Prof. Yufeng Zhou
Dr. Wentao Wang
Guest Editors

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Published Papers (11 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 8097 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Design and Test of a Microdestructive Tree-Ring Measurement System

by Xueyang Hu, Yili Zheng, Hao Liang and Yandong Zhao

Sensors 2020, 20(11), 3253; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20113253 - 07 Jun 2020

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2766

Abstract

Analysis of a tree ring is the primary method for determining the growth and age of a tree. In a microdestructive tree-ring measurement system, the tree under test is drilled with a microdrill at a constant rotating speed to detect the difference in density between the early and late wood, thereby realizing a microdestructive measurement of the tree-ring. The measurement system comprises a microdrill with a diameter of 3 mm, mechanical transmission, direct current (DC) servomotor, stepper motor, and control and detection circuit. The DC servomotor and stepper motor realize rotation and translation of the microdrill, respectively, through mechanical transmission. When the microdrill rotates and drills into the tree, the control and detection circuit samples and acquires the armature current of the DC servomotor, which is proportional to the resistance encountered by the drill bit and reflects the change in the density of the tree. The tree-ring number can be obtained by filtering the sampled original signals of the armature current using a finite impulse response (FIR) filtering algorithm. The annual rings of larch and fir tree discs were measured and tested using the designed system. It was observed that the average annual ring measurement accuracy of the larch discs reached 95.28%, while that of the fir discs was 84.16%. The diameter of the drill hole in the trunk was less than 3 mm after measuring the living wood, thereby achieving a microdestructive measurement of the tree-ring. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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18 pages, 5040 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Class-J Power Amplifier Implementation for Ultrasound Device Applications

by Kiheum You, Seung-Hwan Kim and Hojong Choi

Sensors 2020, 20(8), 2273; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20082273 - 16 Apr 2020

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4724

Abstract

In ultrasonic systems, power amplifiers are one of the most important electronic components used to supply output voltages to ultrasonic devices. If ultrasonic devices have low sensitivity and limited maximum allowable voltages, it can be quite challenging to detect the echo signal in the ultrasonic system itself. Therefore, the class-J power amplifier, which can generate high output power with high efficiency, is proposed for such ultrasonic device applications. The class-J power amplifier developed has a power efficiency of 63.91% and a gain of 28.16 dB at 25 MHz and 13.52 dB_m input. The pulse-echo measurement method was used to verify the performance of the electronic components used in the ultrasonic system. The echo signal appearing with the discharged high voltage signal was measured. The amplitude of the first echo signal in the measured echo signal spectrum was 4.4 V and the total-harmonic-distortion (THD), including the fundamental signal and the second harmonic, was 22.35%. The amplitude of the second echo signal was 1.08 V, and the THD, including the fundamental signal and the second harmonic, was 12.45%. These results confirm that a class-J power amplifier can supply a very high output echo signal to an ultrasonic device. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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23 pages, 10651 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Structural Health Monitoring for Jacket-Type Offshore Wind Turbines: Experimental Proof of Concept

by Yolanda Vidal, Gabriela Aquino, Francesc Pozo and José Eligio Moisés Gutiérrez-Arias

Sensors 2020, 20(7), 1835; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20071835 - 26 Mar 2020

Cited by 22 | Viewed by 4822

Abstract

Structural health monitoring for offshore wind turbines is imperative. Offshore wind energy is progressively attained at greater water depths, beyond 30 m, where jacket foundations are presently the best solution to cope with the harsh environment (extreme sites with poor soil conditions). Structural integrity is of key importance in these underwater structures. In this work, a methodology for the diagnosis of structural damage in jacket-type foundations is stated. The method is based on the criterion that any damage or structural change produces variations in the vibrational response of the structure. Most studies in this area are, primarily, focused on the case of measurable input excitation and vibration response signals. Nevertheless, in this paper it is assumed that the only available excitation, the wind, is not measurable. Therefore, using vibration-response-only accelerometer information, a data-driven approach is developed following the next steps: (i) the wind is simulated as a Gaussian white noise and the accelerometer data are collected; (ii) the data are pre-processed using group-reshape and column-scaling; (iii) principal component analysis is used for both linear dimensionality reduction and feature extraction; finally, (iv) two different machine-learning algorithms, k nearest neighbor (k-NN) and quadratic-kernel support vector machine (SVM), are tested as classifiers. The overall accuracy is estimated by 5-fold cross-validation. The proposed approach is experimentally validated in a laboratory small-scale structure. The results manifest the reliability of the stated fault diagnosis method being the best performance given by the SVM classifier. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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17 pages, 682 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Vibration-Based Structural Health Monitoring Using Piezoelectric Transducers and Parametric t-SNE

by David Agis and Francesc Pozo

Sensors 2020, 20(6), 1716; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20061716 - 19 Mar 2020

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2618

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the so-called parametric t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (P-t-SNE), comparing it to the performance of the t-SNE, the non-parametric version. The methodology used in this study is introduced for the detection and classification of structural changes in the field of structural health monitoring. This method is based on the combination of principal component analysis (PCA) and P-t-SNE, and it is applied to an experimental case study of an aluminum plate with four piezoelectric transducers. The basic steps of the detection and classification process are: (i) the raw data are scaled using mean-centered group scaling and then PCA is applied to reduce its dimensionality; (ii) P-t-SNE is applied to represent the scaled and reduced data as 2-dimensional points, defining a cluster for each structural state; and (iii) the current structure to be diagnosed is associated with a cluster employing two strategies: (a) majority voting; and (b) the sum of the inverse distances. The results in the frequency domain manifest the strong performance of P-t-SNE, which is comparable to the performance of t-SNE but outperforms t-SNE in terms of computational cost and runtime. When the method is based on P-t-SNE, the overall accuracy fluctuates between 99.5% and 99.75%. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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17 pages, 7231 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Structural Health Monitoring System Based on FBG Sensing Technique for Chinese Ancient Timber Buildings

by Shao-Fei Jiang, Ze-Hui Qiao, Ni-Lei Li, Jian-Bin Luo, Sheng Shen, Ming-Hao Wu and Ying Zhang

Sensors 2020, 20(1), 110; https://doi.org/10.3390/s20010110 - 23 Dec 2019

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 4269

Abstract

Due to the long-term service, Chinese ancient timber buildings show varying degrees of wear. Thus, structural health monitoring (SHM) for these cultural and historical treasures is desperately needed to evaluate the service status. Although there are some FBG sensing-based SHM systems, they are not suitable for Chinese ancient timber buildings due to the differences in architectural types, structural loads, materials, and environment. Besides, a technical gap in Fiber Bragg grating (FBG) sensing-based column inclination monitoring exists. To overcome these weaknesses, this paper develops an FBG sensing-based structural health monitoring system for Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber buildings that aims at monitoring structural deformation, i.e., beam deflection and column inclination, temperature, humidity, and fire around the building. An in-situ test and simulation analyses were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the developed SHM system. To validate the long-term-operation of the developed SHM system, monitoring data within 15 months were analyzed. The results show good agreement between the developed SHM system in this paper and other methods. In addition, the SHM system operated well in the first year after its deployment. This implies that the developed SHM system is applicable and effective in the health state monitoring of Chinese ancient Chuan-dou-type timber buildings, laying a foundation for damage prognosis of such types of timber buildings. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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19 pages, 7528 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Scanning Acoustic Microscopy (SAM): A Robust Method for Defect Detection during the Manufacturing Process of Ultrasound Probes for Medical Imaging

by Francesco Bertocci, Andrea Grandoni and Tatjana Djuric-Rissner

Sensors 2019, 19(22), 4868; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19224868 - 08 Nov 2019

Cited by 33 | Viewed by 11513

Abstract

The main aim of this paper is to provide the feasibility of non-destructive testing (NDT) method, such as scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM), for damage detection in ultrasound (US) probes for medical imaging during the manufacturing process. In a highly competitive and demanding electronics and biomedical market, reliable non-destructive methods for quality control and failure analysis of electronic components within multi-layered structures are strongly required. Any robust non-destructive method should be capable of dealing with the complexity of miniaturized assemblies, such as the acoustic stack of ultrasonic transducers. In this work, the application of SAM in an industrial scenario was studied for 24 samples of a phased array probe, in order to investigate potential internal integrity, to detect damages, and to assess the compliance of high-demanding quality requirements. Delamination, non-homogeneous layers with micron-thickness, and entrapped air bubbles (blisters) in the bulk of US probe acoustic stacks were detected and studied. Analysis of 2D images and defects visualization by means of ultrasound-based NDT method were compared with electroacoustic characterization (also following as pulse-echo test) of the US probe through an ad-hoc measurement system. SAM becomes very useful for defect detection in multilayered structures with a thickness of some microns by assuring low time-consuming (a limit for other NDT techniques) and quantitative analyses based on measurements. The study provides a tangible contribution and identifies an advantage for manufacturers of ultrasound probes that are oriented toward continuous improvement devoted to the process capability, product quality, and in-process inspection. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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13 pages, 4774 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Satellite-Based Wireless Sensor Development and Deployment Studies for Surface Wave Testing

by Pengju Xu and Wentao Wang

Sensors 2019, 19(20), 4364; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19204364 - 09 Oct 2019

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2249

Abstract

Although cable-based seismic sensing systems have provided reliable data in the past several decades, they become a bottleneck for large-area monitoring and critical environmental (volcanic eruptions) sensing because of their cost, difficulty in deploying and expanding, and lack of accurate three-dimensional geographic information. In this paper, a new wireless sensing system is designed consisting of a portable satellite device, a self-sustaining power source, a low-cost computational core, and a high-precision sensor. The emphasis of this paper is to implement in low-cost hardware without requirements of highly specialized and expensive data acquisition instruments. Meanwhile, a computational-core-embedded algorithm based on compressive sensing (CS) is also developed to compress data size for transmission and encrypt the measured data preventing information loss. Seismic data captured by the accelerometer sensor are coded into compressive data packages and then transferred via satellite communication to a cloud-based server for storage. Acceleration and GPS information is decrypted by the ℓ₁-norm minimization optimization algorithm for further processing. In this research, the feasibility of the proposed sensing system for the acquisition of seismic testing is investigated in an outdoor field surface wave testing. Results indicate the proposed low-cost wireless sensing system has the capability of collecting ground motions, transferring data, and sharing GPS information via satellite communication for large area monitoring. In addition, it has a great potential of recovering measurements even with significant data package loss. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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15 pages, 2964 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Modeling Flaw Pulse-Echo Signals in Cylindrical Components Using an Ultrasonic Line-Focused Transducer with Consideration of Wave Mode Conversion

by Weixin Wang, Xiling Liu, Xiongbing Li, Gang Xu and Shuzeng Zhang

Sensors 2019, 19(12), 2744; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19122744 - 18 Jun 2019

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2845

Abstract

Investigations on flaw responses can benefit the nondestructive testing of cylinders using line-focused transducers. In this work, the system function, the wave beam model, and a flaw scattering model are combined to develop an ultrasonic measurement model for line-focused transducers to predict flaw responses in cylindrical components. The system function is characterized using reference signals by developing an acoustic transfer function for line-focused transducers, which works at different distances for both planar and curved surfaces. The wave beams in cylindrical components are modeled using a multi-Gaussian beam model, where the effects of wave mode conversion and curvatures of cylinders are considered. Simulation results of wave beams are provided to analyze their propagation behaviors. The proposed ultrasonic measurement model is certified from good agreement between the experimental and predicted signals of side-drilled holes. This work provides guidance for evaluating the detection ability of line-focused transducers in cylindrical component testing applications. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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15 pages, 4416 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Corrosion Monitoring Method of Porous Aluminum Alloy Plate Hole Edges Based on Piezoelectric Sensors

by Wei Dai, Xiangyu Wang, Meng Zhang, Weifang Zhang and Rongqiao Wang

Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1106; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051106 - 05 Mar 2019

Cited by 13 | Viewed by 3118

Abstract

Corrosion damage to the aircraft structure can significantly reduce the safety performance and endanger flight safety. Especially when the corrosion occurs in a stress concentration region, such as hole edges, it can easily threaten the entire structure. In this paper, an on-line imaging qualitative monitoring algorithm based on piezoelectric sensors is proposed for detecting hole edge corrosion damage of porous aluminum alloy structures. The normalized amplitude is used to characterize the correlation between the initial Lamb wave signal and the damage signal, which is as an image reconstruction parameter in the algebraic iterative probability reconstruction algorithm. Moreover, a homogenization algorithm is proposed to process the reconstruction results. The experimental results of single hole and double hole corrosion for porous aluminum alloy plate show that the method can effectively achieve the location and quantification of corrosion damage to one and two holes of the porous structure. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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15 pages, 3463 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Quick Classifying Method for Tracking and Erosion Resistance of HTV Silicone Rubber Material via Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy

by Ping Chen, Xilin Wang, Xun Li, Qishen Lyu, Naixiao Wang and Zhidong Jia

Sensors 2019, 19(5), 1087; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19051087 - 03 Mar 2019

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 3372

Abstract

Silicone rubber material is widely used in high-voltage external insulation systems due to its excellent hydrophobicity and hydrophobicity transfer performance. However, silicone rubber is a polymeric material with a poor ability to resist electrical tracking and erosion; therefore, some fillers must be added to the material for performance enhancement. The inclined plane test is a standard method used for evaluating the tracking and erosion resistance by subjecting the materials to a combination of voltage stress and contaminate droplets to produce failure. This test is time-consuming and difficult to apply in field inspection. In this paper, a new and faster way to evaluate the tracking and erosion resistance performance is proposed using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS). The influence of filler content on the tracking and erosion resistance performance was studied, and the filler content was characterized by thermogravimetric analysis and the LIBS technique. In this paper, the tracking and erosion resistance of silicone rubber samples was correctly classified using principal component analysis (PCA) and neural network algorithms based on LIBS spectra. The conclusions of this work are of great significance to the performance characterization of silicone rubber composite materials. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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20 pages, 8040 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Damage Quantification with Embedded Piezoelectric Aggregates Based on Wavelet Packet Energy Analysis

by Zijian Wang, Li Wei and Maosen Cao

Sensors 2019, 19(2), 425; https://doi.org/10.3390/s19020425 - 21 Jan 2019

Cited by 19 | Viewed by 4032

Abstract

Cement-based components have been widely used in civil engineering structures. However, due to wearing and deterioration, the cement-based components may have brittle failure. To provide early warning and to support predictive reinforcement, the piezoelectric materials are embedded into the cement-based components to excite and receive elastic waves. By recognizing the abnormalities in the elastic waves, hidden damage can be identified in advance. However, few research has been published regarding the damage quantification. In this paper, the wavelet packet analysis is adopted to calculate the energy of the transmitted elastic waves based on the improved piezoelectric aggregates (IPAs). Due to the growth of the damage, less elastic waves can pass through the damage zone, decreasing the energy of the acquired signals. A set of cement beams with different crack depths at the mid-span is tested in both numerical and experimental ways. A damage quantification index, namely the wavelet packet-based energy index (WPEI), is developed. Both the numerical and experimental results demonstrate that the WPEI decreases with respect to the crack depth. Based on the regression analysis, a strong linear relationship has been observed between the WPEI and the crack depth. By referring to the linear relationship, the crack depth can be estimated by the WPEI with a good accuracy. The results demonstrated that the use of the IPAs and the WPEI can fulfill the real-time quantification of the crack depth in the cement beams. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sensors Based NDE and NDT)

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