Abstract:In the use of materials, by various factors, will inevitably produce a lot of damage, damage to the integrity of the material structure, but also has a certain degree of security risks. In the field of non-destructive testing, especially in the field of guided wave testing, there is a lack of efficient methods to detect the size of damage in materials and structures, therefore, there are still many difficulties in the process of using guided wave method to detect micro-cracks and other damages of materials. A damage detection method based on sparse guided waves is stud-ied, which can be used to locate structural damage and measure damage size at the same time. It is shown that the complex reflected wave generated by the damage includes many information related to the shape and size of the damage, but these information are not obvious and the signal overlap can not be distinguished. Therefore, a sparse lamb wave method is proposed to decompose the components of the reflected signal generated by material damage. On this basis, the damage size is calculated by determining the corresponding propagation time of each reflected signal component. Finally, the experimental results on aluminum plate with artificial damage show that the method based on sparse guided wave damage detection is feasible.