Fatigue crack growth monitoring of an aluminum joint structure

Abstract

The detection, location, and sizing of a fatigue crack emanating from a fastener hole in an aluminum plate is investigated. Two linear arrays of surface mounted piezoelectric disk transducers send and receive ultrasonic guided waves that are transmitted, reflected, and scattered by both the joint geometry and the fatigue crack. A tomography algorithm is used to detect and locate the crack. Amplitude ratio and signal difference coefficients are explored as candidate features to size the crack, which is necessary for reliability and remaining life calculations. Both of these features are quite sensitive to fatigue crack lengths as small as 0.13 of the hole diameter. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.