Damage Pursuit: A MATLAB package for automatic structural defect localization

What is Damage Pursuit?

Damage Pursuit is a software package designed to assist in the localization of structural defects in solid media. The package takes as input an array of wavefield data (time histories of displacements at a grid of points on a material surface), and returns an image displaying the coordinates of localized defects in the material. The routine requires no prior knowledge of the material properties or characterization of pristine baseline cases, with only minimal user involvement.

Principle of Operation

When a solid medium is excited with acoustic waves, the waves propagate through the structure. If defects or anomalous regions are present in the structure, they disturb the incident waves and cause a change in the response of the wavefield in their neighborhoods:

The overall wavefield can be thought of a superposition of two components: one component representing the spatially-localized and temporally-persistent features associated with the behavior in close proximity to the defects, and the other approximating the large, smooth features of the response in a hypothetical undamaged medium.

Damage Pursuit exploits these structural differences in the components to separate, or “demix,” the wavefield data, as in the example below.