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Title: Nonstationary Vibro-Acoustic Modulation for Crack Detection in a Representative Wing Attachment Fitting

Authors: Nathanael C. Yoder Douglas E. Adams

ABSTRACT One practical issue that must be addressed prior to the implementation of any vibration based structural health monitoring technique is the influence that variations in the structures environmental and boundary conditions can have on the vibration response of the structure. This issue is especially prominent in the structural health monitoring of aircraft, which operate in a wide variety of different environmental conditions and possess complex structural components connected through various boundary conditions. However, many types of damage introduce nonlinear stiffness and damping restoring forces, which may be used to detect damage even in the midst of these varying conditions. Vibro-acoustic modulation is a nondestructive evaluation technique that is highly sensitivity to the presence of nonlinearities. One complicating factor in its application as a structural health monitoring technique is that the amount of measured modulation has been shown to be dependent on the frequency of the probing signal. The frequency dependence of the modulation was investigated and the magnitude of modulation was found to be linearly correlated to the underlying vibration spectrum of the structure. To facilitate the use of nonlinear vibro-acoustics for the health monitoring of a complex aerospace components in varying environments, a vibro-acoustic modulation technique utilizing a swept probing signal has been developed and demonstrated on steel beams in varying operational conditions. The implementation of this method on a surrogate wing attachment fitting using a random pumping signal will be explored in the subsequent presentation of this research. INTRODUCTION In recent years vibration based structural health monitoring (SHM) has become a well-researched area in which a wide variety of different approaches have been applied to many types of structural components and systems [1]. It has repeatedly been noted in the literature that environmental changes can have very large effects on the linear modal parameters of a structure [2-5]. While methods have been developed these variations are not taken into account, they can result in either a false indication of damage or missed damage due to how changes in the structures linear vibration characteristics mask the effects of damage [6]. _____________
Nathanael C. Yoder and Douglas E. Adams, Purdue University, Purdue Center for Systems Integrity, 1500 Kepner Drive, Lafayette, IN 47905-6578 USA.

In general, this problem can be mitigated by either including these variations in a model of the system or by constructing a SHM system around features that are less affected by these variations. If the former methodology is adopted, either extra measurements must be acquired so that the effects of these changes in environmental or boundary conditions can be compensated for, or a database based approach (such as that in [7]) must be used. Although both of these approaches have been successfully demonstrated in the literature, they both have drawbacks. Database based approaches require that baseline data be taken for all of the environmental and operational conditions that the structure will see during its lifetime, while the model based approach requires additional measurements, increases the models complexity, and places emphasis on the models accuracy across multiple domains [8]. Recently the extraction of nonlinear features from vibration measurements for use in SHM systems have received attention [9] in part because they may prove less influenced by environmental variations than traditional linear techniques[10] . One nondestructive evaluation method that has been shown to be sensitive to the presence of cracks in complex geometric structures is nonlinear vibro-acoustic modulation (VAM) (also referred to as nonlinear elastic wave modulation spectroscopy) [13]. This nonlinear damage detection method relies on the modulation of a low frequency pumping signal by a higher frequency probing signal that occurs in the presence of nonlinearities. Because nonlinearities are typically small in undamaged materials operating at low amplitudes, nonlinear modulation has been used to identify cracks in structures ranging from concrete beams [14] to automotive engine blocks [13]. However, as it is typically performed, VAM requires the selection of an appropriate probing frequency in addition to a high-energy pumping signal, both of which limit VAMs applicability and robustness as a SHM method. To investigate the sensitivity and robustness of VAM a series of tests were run on a steel beam to investigate the dependence of this method on the underlying linear characteristics of the structure as well as the methods robustness despite temperature and boundary condition variations. The detection of cracks in a representative wing attachment fitting will also be investigated in the presentation that corresponds to this paper.

Figure 1. (Left) The FRF (black) produced using the stack actuator and output spectra (gray) from VAM at a given point on the beam. (Right) The magnitude of the modulation vs. the magnitude of the linear frequency response of the beam at fprobe-2fpump (+) , fprobe-fpump (o) , fprobe+fpump (*) , and fprob-2fpump (x).

FREQUENCY DEPENDENCE OF VAM To investigate the underlying causes of VAMs frequency dependence, a steel beam in which a fatigue crack had been created was investigated using a PolyTec scanning laser Doppler vibrometer (SLDV). The beam was suspended using fishing line to simulate a free-free boundary condition. A PCB 712A02 disc actuator was affixed to the bottom of the beam and a PI Ceramics P-010.10 piezoelectric stack actuator was attached at the top. The SLDV was used to acquire the response of the beam at 123 different points spread across the length of the beam. The vibration characteristics of the cracked beam were then investigated in both the high and low frequency ranges. This investigation was performed by first driving the disc actuator with low amplitude white noise while the response was acquired up to 20 kHz. The stack actuator was then driven with white noise while the response was acquired up to 80 kHz. White noise was used in both tests in an attempt to minimize the effects of the structures nonlinear response due to the crack. To investigate the relationship that the frequency of the probing signal has on the amount of modulation, a probing frequency of 15.5 kHz was used along with a pumping frequency of 763.3 Hz for VAM. When the auto-spectra of the velocity measurements across the beam were computed, it was apparent that the measured magnitude of the sidebands was strongly correlated to the magnitude of the previously acquired vibration spectra at that same point. The left plot in Figure 1 shows a clear example of this case. In fact, at this point on the beam the first sideband below the probing frequency (fpump-fprob) could not be distinguished from the noise floor of the measurement whereas the second harmonic (fpump-2fprob) could be easily seen. The magnitude of the vibration spectra at the modulation frequencies was then plotted against the magnitude of the first two sidebands on either side of the probing frequency at all of the points across the beam and the results are shown on the right hand side of Figure 1. The strong linear correlation between the amount of modulation and the magnitude of the vibration spectrum suggests that the amount of modulation measured will depend on the underlying vibration of the system at the sideband frequencies. This may help explain the fact that in some cases modulation is only apparent on one side of the probing signal [10] as well as the variations of modulation based on the selected probing frequency [11, 12].

(c) (b) (a) Figure 2. The response of the nonlinear system to a swept probing signal as in the (a, top) time, (a, bottom) frequency, and (b) time-frequency domains. The spectrogram of the extracted modulation (c).

NONSTATIONARY VIBRO-ACOUTIC MODULTION Because the amount of measured modulation is related to the vibration response of the structure and operational conditions influence a structures vibration response, VAM must be modified to interrogate multiple frequencies in a short amount of time in order to be a robust damage detection method. For instance, in the example presented in Figure 1 (left) if the resonances of the structure decreased evenly by approximately 2.5%, the sidebands would fall at relatively low points in the linear response and the presence of the crack-induced modulation would be much more difficult to detect using a probing signal at 15.5 kHz. A time varying probing frequency cannot be used the traditional frequency domain analysis techniques, however, because if the probing signal is swept over a frequency range that is greater than the frequency of the low frequency pumping signal, the probing frequency will mask the presence of the modulation. This is evident in the response of a Simulink model with nonlinear cubic and quadratic nonlinearities as shown in Figure 2 (a, bottom) and Figure 2 (b). The approach taken in this work was to extract the modulation in the time domain using Hilbert Transform based envelope demodulation and then transform the modulation into the time-frequency domain using the short time Fourier transform. This method allowed the presence of modulation to be detected while still maintaining the ability to determine what probing frequencies resulted in the most modulation (Figure 2, (c)). The ability to determine which frequencies correspond to high modulation levels may be able to be used in the future to focus on specific areas of the structure. ROBUST CRACK DETECTION ON A CANTELIEVER BEAM To investigate the ability of VAM to detect cracks despite operational variability, a steel beam was testing under a variety of different operational loads after which it was fatigued until a crack was created. The beam was 30.5 cm long, 2.54 cm wide and 0.635 cm thick. A list of the investigated operational conditions is shown in Table 1. The beam was mounted to an electrodynamic shaker for all tests, as shown in Figure 3. To seed a crack, an Electric Discharge Machining (EDM) notch was created in the beam prior to testing. The large piezoelectric disk actuator pictured in Figure 3 directly below accelerometer B was used to apply frequency sweeps so that the transmissibility [16] between the Z-direction of accelerometer B and accelerometer A could be calculated from 0.1 to 20 kHz The magnitude of these transmissibility functions is shown in Figure 4. There was a significant difference in the transmissibility from the undamaged states and when the crack was present, but there was also a large variation in the transmissibility after the beam had been fatigued for 1000 cycles and no crack had been created. This observation suggested that a large amount of the variation might have been due to the fact that in order to fatigue the beam, the shaker had to be rotated and the beam removed from its boundary condition. The difficulty in distinguishing between these two outlying transmissibility functions reinforces the idea that the detection of damage using a linear vibration based method is difficult in the face of operational variability.

TABLE 1. THE DIFFERENT OPERATIONAL CONDITIONS INVESTIGATED THROUGHOUT THIS PAPER.

Operational Condition Baseline Loosened Bolts Perturbed BCs Temperature 1000 Cycles 5000 Cycles Change in Condition None Front 2 bolts loosened from 27.1 to 40.7 Newton-meters Beam removed from and then replaced in fixture Beam heated from ~26 C to ~43 C No cracks visually apparent after fatiguing 1000 cycles Crack of average depth 0.55 mm visually apparent on both sides of beam after fatiguing 4000 more cycles.

1 A

2 B

4 5

EDM Notch Figure 3. Experimental configuration for applying vibro-acoustic modulation to a progressively damaged steel beam

Figure 4. The calculated transmissibility functions between the z-direction acceleration measured by accelerometer B and the response of accelerometer A (left) and the corresponding damage power [16] (right) for each operational condition.

VAM was also performed in each operating condition. The probing signal was excited using a small piezoelectric disk buzzer that was placed at five different locations along the beam (points 1 to 5 in Figure 3). During the acquisition process, the buzzer was swept from 60 kHz down to 20 kHz over 4 seconds. The response was then measured using accelerometer A while a sinusoidal pumping signal at 412 Hz was applied using the electrodynamic shaker on which the beam was mounted. To remove the structural response of the beam from the envelope it was assumed that the variation in the envelope of the output signal due to the structural response would be of a much longer time scale than the variations due to the modulation and, consequently, that these variations could be removed from the envelope through the use of a high pass filter. To obtain the level of the probing signal at a given frequency, a Savitzky-Golay [17] filter was applied to the envelope extracted using the Hilbert transform. Because it has been shown that the amount of modulation is linearly

proportional to the probing signal [18] the extracted envelope was used to normalize the signal. After the normalization process, the spectrogram of the resulting signal was taken to investigate if modulation had occurred at harmonics of the pumping signal. The spectrogram for the bolts loosened and damaged conditions are shown in Figure 5. All other spectrograms showed lower levels of modulation. The amount of modulation varied significantly with the frequency of the probing signal as has been discussed in previous studies [11, 12]. Two different methods for determining the presence of damage using the spectrograms of the normalized modulation were investigated. The first method detected the presence of significant amounts of bandlimited modulation without utilizing a set of baseline data from the healthy structure. This was accomplished by comparing the maximum energy of the spectrogram across time at the harmonics of the pumping signal to the maximum energy at other frequencies, where modulation is not expected to be present. The experimental CDF of the energy that was not at harmonics of the pumping signal was generated and fit using the generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution model [20] (Figure 6). Because the GEV distribution must be fit to the data, the model parameters themselves may be inaccurate and the fact that this model is an estimate with associated uncertainties should be recognized. Therefore, the 99.9% confidence limit for both the best-fit model and the model generated using the 99% upper confidence limit for the model parameter estimates were generated. As can be seen from Figure 6 not only does the distribution fit the data well but the modulation seen in the damaged case clearly exceed both the 99.9% confidence interval for both models as well. Neither threshold was exceeded for any of the other operational conditions investigated. If a damage detection method that utilizes historical data is acceptable, this may be a more practical way to detect damage because the structure of interest may be mildly nonlinear and cause modulation even when it is undamaged. In order to investigate such a method, the mean amount of energy across the spectrogram for each of the operational conditions was divided by the level of modulation in the baseline condition for all five different actuator locations used in this test. The normalized modulation metric that was generated is shown in Figure 7. The healthy conditions were separated from the damaged condition by at least 15 standard deviations of the healthy conditions for all actuator location. This drastic change in the amount of normalized modulation that was only seen when the crack was present reinforces the robustness of a modulation based damage detection method to operational variations. CONCULSIONS Because of the sensitivity of a structures linear vibration parameters to changes in the environmental and boundary conditions of that structure, VAM has been investigated as a crack detection method to detect cracks despite variations in these parameters. It has been found that the amount of measured modulation at a given probing frequency is related to the underlying quasi-linear vibration response of the cracked structure. Because of this reliance, there may be probing frequencies at which modulation is not evident despite the fact that the structure has a crack. A method utilizing a swept probing signal has been developed to increase the robustness of

VAM and was used to detect the presence of a crack in a cantilevered steel beam despite variations in the beams boundary conditions and temperature. The presentation of these results will also include data from a representative wing attachment fitting.

Figure 5. The spectrograms of the normalized modulation envelopes from the loosened bolts (left), and 5000 cycles (right) operational conditions on the same Z-scale. White indicates a higher level of normalized modulation. All other operational conditions had lower levels of modulation.

Figure 6. Spectrogram maxima at frequencies that were not at the pumping signals harmonics (o), the best-fit distribution to these maxima and its 99.9% confidence limit (-), the distribution from the upper 99% confidence limit on the model parameters as well as its 99.9% confidence limit (- -), and the spectrograms maxima at the pumping signals first (+), second (x), and third (*) harmonics.

Figure 7. VAM normalized damage index for each of the five different actuator locations normalized by the baseline level of modulation for that location. The damaged beams modulation level for each of the actuator locations is denoted with an +.

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