A Modified Time Reversal Method for Guided Wave Detection of Bolt Loosening in Simulated Thermal Protection System Panels

In this work, a modified time reversal method is proposed for guided wave detection and localizing loosened bolt in a complicated multibolt-jointed structure. Different from the traditional time reversal guided wave method, the response signal due to a tone burst input received at the healthy state is time reversed and recorded as a standard reemitting signal. In the detection process, this recorded standard signal is used for all damage cases to yield time reversal-focalized reconstruction signals. This largely improves the sensitivity of the focalized signal to damage state. In this paper, the peak amplitude of the focalized wave packet in the reconstructed signal is calculated and utilized as tightness index. By bonding PZT transducers at different joint locations inside the structure, multiple tightness indices, where each tightness index presents the correlation between the current joint condition to its healthy condition at the joint, can be obtained. To analyze a large number of tightness indices, a principle component analysis method is introduced, and a neural network-based loosening detection method is proposed. The proposed method is experimentally validated in a simulated double-layer bolt-jointed thermal protection system panel. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is effective to identify and localized the bolt loosening in complicated multibolt-jointed structure. The detection and identification of the location of multibolt loosening is realized