Investigation on vibration excitation of debonded sandwich structures using time-average digital holography

Sandwich structures, in the modern aerospace industry, are more sought after due to their high strength to stiffness ratio resulting in significant weight gains. Optical techniques like time-average holography and shearography are preferred in industries for inspection of huge sandwich and composite panels because of whole-field (full coverage) inspection in a lesser time leading to large savings in cost. These techniques conventionally use sinusoidal frequency sweep to capture the local resonance of defective regions. This paper highlights the difficulties with the conventional approach of time-average digital holography (TADH) and proposes a novel defect identification strategy through square wave excitation. The proposed method enhances the speed and accuracy of inspection; thereby it saves cost and increases confidence level. Extensive experiments have been carried out using honeycomb sandwich panels to demonstrate the methodology.