Toward an ultrasonic inspecting method to detect and classify adhesive bonding defects in real time: a numeric study

Abstract

Adhesive bonding is an efficient method to join different components in structural design. However, a reliable nondestructive inspecting method to attest the integrity of adhesive bonds is still an open task. In the last few decades, many researchers have put effort into addressing this demand, and the methods based on ultrasound have emerged as the most promising ones. It is consensual that the capability of modeling both mathematically and computationally the interaction between ultrasonic waves and adhesive bonds will play a crucial role in the development of any ultrasonic inspecting method. In that sense, in a previous work, an algorithm to compute the scattering of ultrasonic waves by defective adhesive bonds was developed and implemented. In the present work, we revisit the algorithm and develop a novel GPU parallel implementation, aiming to reduce considerably the execution time. As shown, our new implementation has reduced the execution time by a factor of around 25, opening the possibility for solving the correlated inverse problem in real time. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time in the literature that GPU is employed to solve this particular ultrasonic scattering problem.