A pulse laser combined LWT technique with a two-stage reconstruction algorithm was proposed to realize rapid damage location, or even the evaluation of damage size for plate-like structures. Since the amplitude of Lamb waves in propagation is highly sensitive to damage, including inside damage, the change of the attenuation coefficient of Lamb waves in the inspection region was used as a damage index to reconstruct damage images. In stage one, the rough area of the damage was identified by a comparison of the amplitude of the testing signal data and reference data (undamaged state). In stage two, the damage image was reconstructed using an inverse approach based on the least-square method. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed rapid approach, experiments on an aluminum plate with a non-penetrating notch and a carbon fiber-reinforced plastic laminated plate with internal delamination induced by a low-velocity impact were carried out. The results show that the notch can be detected with accurate location, and the delamination image can be reconstructed successfully.
Keywords: Inverse algorithm; damage; image; lamb wave tomography; rapid inspection technique; wave attenuation.