Special issue on ultrasonic guided waves for structural health monitoring

This special issue of the Journal of Vibration and Control contains a selection of the contributed papers presented at the Special Session on Ultrasonic Guided Waves for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) of the 10th European Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring (EWSHM), held in Palermo, Italy, July 4–7, 2022. The Special Session organized by Wieslaw Ostachowicz and Annamaria Pau was attended in person by 43 partic- ipants from 20 countries, including China, India, the UK and the USA. A total of 27 of them contributed in the form of a full paper in the Workshop Proceedings (Rizzo and Milazzo, 2022), which were published by Springer in volume 270 of the series Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering (2023), which is indexed in Scopus and WOS. The EWSHM event provided a forum to discuss some of the recent developments in the area of Structural Health Monitoring. The Special Session had a particular emphasis on the information that can be extracted from the response of a structure subjected to travelling guided waves. Based on the referee reports, a selection of abstracts and papers led to six papers that were further improved for inclusion in this special issue. The guest editors, including Piervincenzo Rizzo, chair of the 10th EWSHM, believe that this group of articles constitutes a sample of the current state of the art of the research in guided waves SHM. Applications of guided waves to SHM have been increasing remarkably in recent years. This is due to the wealth of information intrinsic in the guided wave structural response, which can be further enhanced by nonlinear phenomena (Kanakambaran and Balasubramaniam, 2024). Numerical analysis and experiments demonstrate that guided waves can be used to reconstruct the image of defects in plates (Zheng et al., 2024) and that the non-linearities can be employed to evaluate adhesion defects (Castellano et al., 2024), material damage (Alnuaimi et al., 2024; Sharma et al., 2024) and stress (Wang and Pau, 2023). In view of further improvements, insight can be gained by the analytical and numerical study of models. In particular, this concerns the role of evanescent modes on the description of the response in the vicinity of a discontinuity (Spada et al., 2024), as well as a multiresolution approach to the solution of the response of a damaged beam, which provides understanding of the role of the different wave modes in the detection of delaminations (Dimitriou et al., 2024). The scope of this special issue is to provide a perspective of tools and applications that can constitute a basis for future research and development in the field of structural health monitoring based on guided ultrasonic waves, in view of an increase in structural safety worldwide.