Assessment of qualitative and quantitative S guided wave tomography of sharp thickness loss defects in the isotropic membrane regime.

Progress in instrumentation, computer hardware, and inversion methods is encouraging the development of more advanced guided wave tomography techniques, especially for nondestructive testing of plate structures to characterize corrosion. An experimental S tomography performance assessment in the membrane regime is reported. One of the main interests of the fundamental membrane regime is that in this regime, waves are propagated over long distances. A 2 mm thick steel disk containing calibrated sharp artificial defects (flat bottom holes) is tested in both reflection and extinction modes. A reconstruction algorithm derived from the membrane approximation is presented. We expose a complete reflection mode inversion approach that includes beam inversion, waveform deconvolution, and thickness loss calibration. Non-linear correction factors are introduced and discussed for quantitative imaging. A width-regularity-depth description of defects is introduced to put the results into perspective with other defect geometries. The results show the relevance of the inversion method to enhance the imaging performance with regard to defect localization and sizing. Crucial points concerning instrumentation such as coupling, signal-to-noise ratio, excitation mode, coupling, selection of frequency, are also discussed.