Time-Reversal-Weighted Path-Integral Inversion for Geometry-Masked Damage Localization

We present a time-reversal-weighted path-integral inversion for damage localization froma simulated 96-element pulse-echo piezoelectric array, in which the reconstruction domain is maskedto the true part outline. Three auxiliary terms, a phase-coherence weight, an envelope-decay weight,and a four-region spatial-consistency score, are evaluated against the time-reversal adjoint through acontrolled component-wise ablation. Under the simulated conditions (200 kHz, 3000 m/s, single and doubledelaminations, additive noise), the full method achieves IoU of 0.375 at the damage region, versus 0.176for RAPID and 0.015 for DAS, and maintains RMSE of 1.77 mm down to −10 dB where DAS degrades to93.9 mm. Point-localization error is insensitive to four of the five components, but IoU and RMSE reveala clear ranking: four-region consistency and envelope decay contribute most to region reconstruction, timereversal drives low-SNR robustness, and phase-coherence and geometry masking affect neither metric inthis configuration. We report this metric-dependent attribution explicitly, since it changes which componentsa downstream implementation should prioritize. All results are synthetic; no experimental validation isperformed.