An intelligent colony optimization imaging method for composites health monitoring using ultrasonic guided wave

•An intelligent colony optimization imaging method is proposed to transform the damage imaging problem into the scattering sources search problem.•The number of imaging trajectories through potential scattering sources is employed as the fitness function to assess the damage possibility in this individual.•The proposed method can accurately locate the location of crack damage with different lengths and delamination damage of anisotropic CFRP structure. Damage imaging technology based on ultrasonic guided wave can characterize and visualize structural damage. However, current imaging methods require high accuracy in wave packets information extraction, resulting in artifacts, large spots and false imaging. Therefore, an intelligent colony optimization imaging method is proposed to transform the damage imaging problem into the scattering sources search problem. The number of imaging trajectories through potential scattering sources is employed as the fitness function to assess the damage possibility in this individual. The fitness function is further implemented to particle swarm optimization algorithm for iterative search of actual scattering sources to find out the damage area with highest damage possibility. After the scattering sources search, the location of the damage can be identified through observing the distribution of the population. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed intelligent imaging method can accurately locate the crack damage of different lengths and delamination damage in composites, and the damage imaging effect is better than that of elliptic imaging.