Full-field guided wave-based damage mapping in honeycomb sandwich panels

Abstract Full-field guided wave measurements provide spatially resolved information on wave propagation and damage interactions in plate structures and composite laminates. In honeycomb sandwich panels, the periodic honeycomb core modulates the measured wavefield and distributes nondamage-related components across a broad wavenumber range, making weak debonding responses difficult to separate. To address this problem, an amplitude normalization-based wavenumber filtering framework is proposed. Temporal amplitude normalization first reduces the influence of the excitation point and propagation-related energy attenuation. Dominant mode filtering and local feature enhancement are then applied sequentially in the two-dimensional wavenumber domain to generate a damage map. The method was evaluated on two experimental honeycomb sandwich panels. The results demonstrated that debonding regions were clearly localized while the characteristic responses associated with the honeycomb core were preserved. Compared with root mean square mapping and curvature mapping, the proposed method reduced interference from the excitation point and produced a more spatially uniform maps. These results support the proposed framework for full-field guided wave-based damage mapping under the tested conditions.