Detection and localization of a defect in a reverberant plate using acoustic field correlation

Green's function can be retrieved from cross-correlation of a diffuse field generated by noise sources. Today, this important result is the fundamental of several passive imaging techniques. The aim of this paper is to establish the suitability of these methods to detect and locate a defect in a reverberant elastic plate. The relations between the noise cross-correlation function over a few number of noise sources and the imaginary part of the Green's function are derived and numerically validated. Then we show through numerical experiments that this technique is exploitable for defect detection and localization in a differential mode, despite a non-perfect estimation of the Green's functions. Finally, a filtering technique based on the singular value decomposition is shown to improve the detection. © 2014 AIP Publishing LL