Detection of underwater limpet mines on ship hulls with Rayleigh-Lamb waves

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Detection of underwater limpet mines on ship hulls with Rayleigh-Lamb waves

Bingham, J.P. / Hinders, M.K.

We describe the use of ultrasonic guided waves for identifying the mass loading due to underwater limpet mines on ship hulls. The Dynamic Wavelet Fingerprint (DFWP) technique is used to render the guided wave mode information in two-dimensional binary images because the waveform features of interest are too subtle to identify in time domain. The use of wavelets allows both time and scale features from the original signals to be retained, and image processing can be used to automatically extract features that correspond to the arrival times of the guided wave modes. For further understanding of how the guided wave modes propagate through the real structures, a parallel processing, 3D elastic wave simulation is developed using the finite integration technique. This full field technique models situations that are too complex for analytical solutions, such as built-up 3D structures. The simulations have produced informative visualizations of the guided wave modes in the structures as well as mimicking directly the output from sensors placed in the simulation space for direct comparison to experiments. Results from both drydock and in-water experiments with dummy mines are also shown.