A fundamental study to enable ultrasonic structural health monitoring of a thick-walled composite over-wrapped pressure vessel

A structural health monitoring system is desired to monitor the integrity of cylindrical, multi-layer carbon over-wrapped pressure vessels intended to house hydrogen at high pressures. In order to develop the system based on ultrasonic guided wave technology, the interaction between ultrasonic guided waves and defect types of interest must be understood. Finite element models in two and three dimensions are developed to predict guided wave motion in the reservoirs. Key parameters are optimized including frequency range, excited modes, detected modes, and transducer dimensions. A novel baseline subtraction technique in the frequency wavenumber domain is presented to increase lower level detection limits. Some experiments are carried out to corroborate the findings in the finite element environment.Ph.D