Ultrasonic Signal Processing for Structural Damage Detection and Quantification

Copyright Notice iv To my parents and to my wife Yang and my daughter Grace for their love, support, encouragement, and inspiration v Acknowledgements I would never have been able to finish my dissertation, reach the heights or explore the breadths of knowledge without the guidance of my committee members, the discussions with my collaborators and colleagues, the support from my family and my wife, and the help from many other people. I would like to thank each member of my committee, Dr. for their guidance. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor Dr. Oppenheim. Thank you for your excellent guidance, encouragement, patience, and providing me with an excellent atmosphere for doing research. Thank you for teaching me how to write an academic paper, how to present my research work, and how to be excellent on many other things. I would like to thank Dr. Greve who has been providing me the greatest insights into my research questions and giving me direct advice on software and hardware issues related to ultrasonic devices. I would like to thank Dr. Junker for guiding me through many difficult problems in my research work using his expertise in the field of ultrasound and his rich working experience in the field of ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation. I would like to thank Dr. Berges and Dr. Harley for providing me great research ideas, teaching me signal processing and machine learning, and giving me advice on many other problems. others for the great support and numerous help in the past years. I would like to thank Dr. Mark Patton at MEP Ltd who had directed me through the experimental work on concrete. His strong expertise on concrete problems had helped me a lot. I would like to thank ç and my collaborators there including Jack Lareau, Mike Burke, and Tom Nenno for their testing devices, advice, and practical knowledge. I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Hay at TechKnowServ Corp for providing me with the frac iron specimens and his great insights and help on my research work. I would also like to thank Dr. Christoph Hurley at NobelClad for his great insights on my research studies on clad steel although this topic is outside the scope of this dissertation. I would also like to thank my fellow graduate student collaborators, It has been an honor for me to work with such smart and …