Spatiotemporal energy regulation strategy for enhancing SNR and spatial resolution in the damage detection with SH0 waves.

• Breaking through the traditional thinking of treating the input energy of EMAT as a single whole, this paper innovatively divides the input energy into multiple dimensions and regulates it. • The SNR and spatial resolution of the damage detection system with SH0 wave are improved using spatiotemporal pulse compression technology (STPCT) and staggered dual-exciter. • The double sidelobe suppression algorithm effectively mitigates sidelobe issues caused by STPCT. The fundamental shear horizontal (SH0) wave, which can be generated by electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs), is widely used in the structural health monitoring fields owing to its non-dispersive nature and the ability to detect over long distances. However, current SH0 wave methods hardly achieve the excellent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the echo signals and satisfactory spatial resolution to defects due to the co-restriction between them. To address these issues, a spatiotemporal energy regulation strategy (STERS) is proposed in this paper to optimize energy distribution in the temporal and spatial dimensions. First, spatiotemporal pulse compression technology (STPCT) is proposed to improve both SNR and spatial range resolution for defect detection. Second, a staggered dual-exciter employing two sets of excitation signals is designed to improve the spatial azimuth resolution. Besides, a double sidelobe suppression algorithm (DSSA) is proposed to suppress sidelobe issues arising from the application of STPCT, thereby further improving the performance of STPCT. Finally, multiple simulations and experiments are executed to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed damage detection system. Results show that our methods can achieve comprehensive improvement in SNR, spatial range resolution, spatial azimuth resolution, and sidelobe suppression ability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]