Traditional non-destructive evaluation (NDE) and structural health monitoring (SHM) systems are used to analyse that a structure is free of any harmful damage. However, these techniques still lack sensitivity to detect the presence of material micro-flaws in the form of fatigue damage and often require timeconsuming procedures and expensive equipment. This research work presents a novel "nonlinear ultrasonic stimulated thermography" (NUST) method able to overcome some of the limitations of traditional linear ultrasonic/thermography NDE-SHM systems and to provide a reliable, rapid and cost effective estimation of fatigue damage in isotropic materials. Such a hybrid imaging approach combines the high sensitivity of nonlinear acoustic/ultrasonic techniques to detect micro-damage, with local defect frequency selection and infrared imaging. When exciting structures with an optimised frequency, nonlinear elastic waves are observed and higher frictional work at the fatigue damaged area is generated due to clapping and rubbing of the crack faces. This results in heat at cracked location that can be measured using an infrared camera. A Laser Vibrometer (LV) was used to evaluate the extent that individual frequency components contribute to the heating of the damage region by quantifying the outof-plane velocity associated with the fundamental and second order harmonic responses. It was experimentally demonstrated the relationship between a nonlinear ultrasound parameter (βratio) of the material nonlinear response to the actual temperature rises near the crack. These results demonstrated that heat generation at damaged regions could be amplified by exciting at frequencies that provide nonlinear responses, thus improving the imaging of material damage and the reliability of NUST in a quick and reproducible manner.

This paper presents a damage detection and localization technique based on nonlinear elastic waves propagation in a damage composite laminate. The proposed method relies on the time of arrival estimation of the second harmonic nonlinear response obtained with second order phase symmetry analysis filtering and burst excitation. The Akaike Information Criterion approach was used to estimate the arrival times measured by six receiver transducers. Then, a combination of Newton's method and unconstrained optimization was employed to solve a system of nonlinear equations in order to obtain the material damage coordinates. To validate this methodology, experimental tests were carried out on a damaged composite plate. The results showed that the technique allows calculating the damage position with high accuracy (maximum error ~5 mm).