Selection of optimal noise filtering technique for guided waves in diagnosis of structural cracks

The presence of random noise as well as narrow band coherent noise makes the structural health monitoring a really challenging issue and to achieve efficient structural health assessment methodology, very good extraction of noise and analysis of the signals are essential. The purpose of this paper is to provide optimal noise filtering technique for Lamb waves in the diagnosis of structural singularities.

Filtration of time-frequency information of multimode Lamb waves through the noisy signal is investigated in the present analysis using matched filtering technique and wavelet denoising methods. Using Shannon’s entropy criterion, the optimal wavelet function is selected and verification is made via the analysis of root mean square error of filtered signal.

The authors propose wavelet matched filter method, a combination of the wavelet transform and matched filtering method, which can significantly improve the accuracy of the filtered signal and identify relatively small damage, especially in enormously noisy data. Correlation coefficient and root mean square error are additionally computed for performance evaluation of the filters.

The present study provides detailed information about various noise filtering methods and a first attempt to apply the combination of the different techniques in signal processing for the structural health monitoring application. A comparative study is performed using the statistical tool to know whether filtered signals obtained through three different methods are acceptable and practicable for guided wave application or not.