Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Signal Processing Method for Detection of Lamination Defects in Molded Composites

In order to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of air-coupled ultrasonic signal in the detection of lamination defects in molded composite, the pulse compression and wavelet filtering hybrid signal processing method is proposed. The selection principle of parameters of the hybrid signal processing method is studied. The actual detection results of molded composite show that the hybrid method is very effective in improving the SNR of air-coupled ultrasonic signal when selecting reasonable parameters (The experiment results demonstrate that the optimal parameters are 13-bit Barker code sequences signal with three-cycle per sub-pulse, db9 wavelet, six decomposition levels, and soft threshold function.). An improvement in SNR up to 18.81 dB is attained compared with the original received signal. The quantitative accuracy of defects in C-scan image based on the hybrid method is also very high, and defects as small as ∅ 5 mm can be easily identified.