Claudiu Placinta (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid) – Damage reconstruction in metallic pieces using topological derivative-based methods

In a broad range of industrial equipment and machinery, the presence of damage like holes, cracks or inclusions in the metallic parts can compromise their structural integrity, and even cause catastrophic failure. Among the wide variety of inspection methods available, we will focus on ultrasonic inspection, which consist of exciting the metallic pieces with elastic waves and measure their response. To process the acquired data we use the topological derivative, which is a scalar function that measures the sensitivity of a functional to infinitesimal domain perturbations. In this work we will address two industrial cases of interest: the inspection of welding joints using elastic waves, and the inspection of thin metallic plates using Lamb waves.