Prognostics and health management techniques have drawn widespread attention due to their ability to facilitate maintenance activities based on need. On-line prognosis of fatigue crack propagation can offer information for optimizing operation and maintenance strategies in real-time. This paper proposes a Lamb wave-particle filter (LW-PF)-based method for on-line prognosis of fatigue crack propagation which takes advantages of the possibility of on-line monitoring to evaluate the actual crack length and uses a particle filter to deal with the crack evolution and monitoring uncertainties. The piezoelectric transducers (PZTs)-based active Lamb wave method is adopted for on-line crack monitoring. The state space model relating to crack propagation is established by the data-driven and finite element methods. Fatigue experiments performed on hole-edge crack specimens have validated the advantages of the proposed method.

The results of Lamb wave identification for the aerospace structures could be easily affected by the nonlinear-dispersion characteristics. In this paper, dispersion compensation of Lamb waves is of particular concern. Compared with the similar research works on the traditional signal domain transform methods, this study is based on signal construction from the viewpoint of nonlinear wavenumber linearization. Two compensation methods of linearly-dispersive signal construction (LDSC) and non-dispersive signal construction (NDSC) are proposed. Furthermore, to improve the compensation effect, the influence of the signal construction process on the other crucial signal properties, including the signal waveform and amplitude spectrum, is considered during the investigation. The linear-dispersion and non-dispersion effects are firstly analyzed. Then, after the basic signal construction principle is explored, the numerical realization of LDSC and NDSC is discussed, in which the signal waveform and amplitude spectrum preservation is especially regarded. Subsequently, associated with the delay-and-sum algorithm, LDSC or NDSC is employed for high spatial resolution damage imaging, so that the adjacent multi-damage or quantitative imaging capacity of Lamb waves can be strengthened. To verify the proposed signal construction and damage imaging methods, the experimental and numerical validation is finally arranged on the aluminum plates.

In practical structural health monitoring with Lamb waves, the signal spatial resolution is usually restricted by not only dispersion but also the space duration of excitation waveforms, that is, the initial spatial resolution for the signals before traveling. As a result, the final resolution and accuracy of damage identification could be badly impaired. To overcome this problem, a signal domain transform method is presented in this article. In signal domain transform, the original dispersive Lamb wave signals are transformed from the time to distance domains, with the time–distance scaling on the excitation waveforms particularly modified. Then, both dispersion compensation and initial spatial resolution enhancement can be actualized to efficiently improve the signal spatial resolution. Considering the practical situation that the structural property parameters could be unavailable to theoretically derive the requisite wavenumber relations, signal domain transform with synthetically measured relative wavenumber curves is further explored. After the frequency domain representation and spatial resolution of Lamb wave signals are basically analyzed, the principle and numerical realization of signal domain transform are investigated. Hereafter, the synthetic measurement of relative wavenumber curves for signal domain transform is discussed and preliminarily validated in an aluminum plate. Finally, signal domain transform is applied for high-resolution imaging of adjacent multiple damages. The efficiency of signal domain transform and signal domain transform–based imaging methods has been well demonstrated by the experimental study on a glass fiber–reinforced composite plate with unknown material parameters.

The production efficiency of biogas digesters is largely restricted by the low environment temperature in winter, for most regions of China. As a feasible means of warming and heat preservation, solar greenhouse has the ability to expand the application scope and service time of biogas in rural China. The evaluation of climate adaptability of solar greenhouse is of great importance and imminent, due to the fact that both solar energy and biomass resources are affected by climate. In this paper, a complete evaluation index system for climate adaptability of biogas fermentation assisted by solar greenhouse was established. The indicators of the evaluation index system were selected by means of frequency analysis and theoretical analysis. The weights of the indicators, including solar radiation, outdoor air temperature, crop yields and human and animal manure, were determined by analytic hierarchy process combined with literature research, and the scoring rules were based on the objective significance of each indicator. The climate adaptability of typical cities in the Yangtze River Delta was evaluated with the evaluation index system. Among the cities, Hefei shows the best comprehensive adaptability, and then is Xuzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, and the lowest adaptability, Hangzhou. The comprehensive adaptability results of these cities depend not only on the gas production capacity, but also on the biomass resource and solar radiation.