A haptic-inspired approach of ultrasonic nondestructive damage classification

This paper adopts the idea of involving human subjects in making structural damage detection and classification decisions. Inspired by human haptics, ultrasonic guided wave scattering information is transformed into audible signals rather than tactile excitations. Ultrasonic waveforms are encoded chordally or melodically into audio signals. Human subjects are trained on these encodings and subject to blind tests. Damage conditions, manifested as scattering changes, are enabled through the scattering matrix to and also audio-encoded for comparison to chordal and melodic encodings. The performance is better than the cases encoded with raw data, as there is more straightforward physics contained in the feature domain.