Imaging in a homogeneous aluminum plate by using ultrasonic waves

This project is about detecting and imaging damage (such as cracks) in a plate by using ultrasonic waves. The waves are generated by a source (an ultrasonic transducer) that is part of a robot that can move on the plate. The waves traveling in the plate are recorded at a receiver (another ultrasonic transducer) that is also carried by the robot. The imaging method we use is Kirchhoff migration and we do a rigorous resolution study of this imaging method for two different configurations of the source/receiver pair, assuming the robot follows a straight path and that certain length scalings hold. Our results reveal that one of the setups gives images with much better resolution than the other one. Imaging on other paths is illustrated with numerical experiments. The application of this research is to aircraft structural health monitoring and is done in collaboration with Thomas Henderson [2] (School of Computing, University of Utah).