Compensation for temperature-dependent phase and velocity of guided wave signals in baseline subtraction for structural health monitoring

Baseline subtraction is commonly used in guided wave structural health monitoring to identify the signal changes produced by defects. However, before subtracting the current signal from the baseline, it is essential to compensate for changes in environmental conditions such as temperature between the two readings. This is often done via the baseline stretch method that seeks to compensate for wave velocity changes with temperature. However, the phase of the signal generated by the transduction system is also commonly temperature sensitive and this effect is neglected in the usual compensation procedure. This article presents a new compensation procedure that deals with both velocity and phase changes. The results with this new method have been compared with those obtained using the standard baseline stretch technique on both a set of experimental signals and a series of synthetic signals with different coherent noise levels, feature reflections, and defect sizes, the range of noise levels and phase changes being chosen based on initial experiments and prior field experience. It has been shown that the new method both reduces the residual signal from a set baseline and enables better defect detection performance than the conventional baseline signal stretch method under all conditions examined, the improvement increasing with the size of the temperature and phase differences encountered. For example, in the experimental data, the new method roughly halved the residual between baseline and current signals when the two signals were acquired at temperatures 15°C apart.