Stiffeners are important structural components in modern composite and honey-comb structures. The safe operation of such composite structures, which are com-monly used in aeronautical applications, requires careful monitoring as hidden de-fects may compromise the structural safety. In order to improve the reliability of ultrasonic damage detection in stiffened plate structures, experimental and numeri-cal studies are conducted, in this paper, in an effort to understand the interaction of guided ultrasonic waves with simple models of the stiffener. Through a series of measurements in different positions, the amplitudes of scattered waves for various configurations of the stiffener are determined. Moreover, the group velocity of the waves in the stiffened structure is analyzed. The experimental findings are compared with results from numerical simulations.
doi: 10.12783/SHM2015/248