Enhanced air-coupled impact echo technique by phase analysis of signals from multiple sensors

This paper presents an air-coupled impact echo (IE) technique that relies on the phase spectrum of the collected data to find the frequencies corresponding to the reflections from delaminations. The proposed technique takes advantage of the fact that the IE compression wave is not a propagating wave, but it is the 1st order symmetrical (S1) mode Lamb wave at zero group velocity (S1-ZGV). Therefore, it searches the phase spectra of the data collected by multiple sensors to locate the frequency corresponding to the lowest phase difference. As a result, the technique reduces the effect of propagating waves, including the direct acoustic wave and ambient noise. It is named the Constant Phase IE (CPIE). The performance of the CPIE is experimentally compared with the regular amplitude spectrum-based IE technique and two other multisensor IE techniques. The CPIE shows a performance advantage, especially in a noisy environment.