Changes in Signal Dimension of Chaotic Ultrasonic Waves During Data Acquisition and Generation

Recent research has shown that structural interrogation using chaotic ultrasonic waves and state space reconstruction may be used beneficially in structural health monitoring processes. A low signal dimension is vital to the efficacy of this method as low-dimensional signals provide reduced processing and storage requirements and increased ability of the system to resolve damage via statistically robust computation of features. This study seeks to examine the effects that a typical data acquisition (DAQ) process has on the signal dimension by examining both simulated and experimental signals. It is concluded that the DAQ process does not substantially alter the embedded dimension of a chaotic signal as long as the digital resolution is at least 12-bits and that increased signal dimension results in decreased damage state resolution.