Veri cation of Lamb Wave

Dispersion
Aerospace Structures Lab, M.Tech (Structures & Design),
II Semester- 2014-2015

Jayesh P, Student ID No.SC14M030

Manoj T K,Student ID No.SC14M028
JAIS VARGHESE (SC14M060),
M. SYAM KUMAR(SC14M085).

Experiment conducted on

February 4, 2015

Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology,

Thiruvanathapuram.

Contents
1 Introduction
1.1 Guided Waves . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2 Lamb Wave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.3 Objective of the experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1
1
2
3

2 Experiment

3 Observations

4 Results and Discussion

5 Conclusion

6 References
1 INTRODUCTION

11

6
1

Introduction

Structural health monitoring(SHM)systems are useful to assess the state of health of structures.
They predict the remaining life of structures in service,through appropriate data processing and
interpretation of the current health. The applications of SHM systems are given below.

1. Many functional aerospace and civil infrastructure systems might have reached or passed its intended design life time.SHM ensures that ageing structures remain in active service for an
extended period.These can result in increased safety and reliability.

2. The increasing age of the existing infrastructure will lead to increase in the cost of maintenance
and repairs. SHM uses condition-based maintenance (CBM) inspection instead of scheduledriven inspections. This will help to reduce the chances of unscheduled, unanticipated
breakdown main-tenance and hence to reduce the maintenance cost.

3. In the case of new systems with embedded SHM devices,the entire design methodology may
undergo a paradigm shift with considerable achievement of savings in weight, size, and cost.
Here the inclusion of SHM from design stage itself is likely to reduce the life-cycle cost.

Structural health monitoring can be e ected in two main ways: (a) passive SHM; and (b) active
SHM. Passive SHM infers the state of structural health from various operational parameters of a
system. Eg: Usage of aircraft design algorithms to infer the useful life and the remaining life of the
aircraft from the ight parameters namely air speed, air turbulence,g-factors etc. But passive SHM
does not directly address core issues like presence and extent of the the damage. On the contrary,
active SHM directly assesses the state of structural health by qualifying and quantifying the structural
damage. The di erence between active SHM and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) methodologies, is
that active SHM devices can be permanently installed on a structure, resulting in an ability to issue
online or on-demand feed back bulletin on structural health.
A schematic representation of a generic SHM system is shown in Fig. 1.

Figure 1: Schematic representation of a generic SHM systems consisting of active sensors, data
concen-trators, wireless communication, and SHM central unit[1]
Active SHM using guided waves especially Lamb waves is becoming popular, due to obvious
advantage that the health monitoring devices can be permanently xed to required structure, without
occupying much space or volume,thereby helping to access information on health issues any time.

1.1

Guided Waves

Guided waves can travel large distances in structures with only little energy loss, because they
remain con ned inside the thin walls of thin wall structures. Thus, they can assess the health of large
areas from a single location.Further, guided waves can travel inside curved walls. Thus they are well
suited for the ultrasonic inspection of aircraft, missiles, pressure vessels,oil tanks, pipelines, etc. The
di erent types of guided waves are
1 INTRODUCTION
2

1. Rayleigh waves
They travel close to the free surface with very little penetration in the depth of the solid. For this
reason, Rayleigh waves are also known as surface-guided waves.

2. SH waves
In Shear Horizontal(SH)waves, the particle motion of the wave is polarized parallel to the plate
surface and perpendicular to the direction of wave propagation. The SH waves can be symmetric and
antisymmetric. Except the very fundamental mode, the SH wave modes are all dispersive.

3. Lamb waves
Lamb waves are waves guided between two parallel free surfaces, like the upper and lower surfaces
of a plate.In at plates,ultrasonic-guided waves travel as Lamb waves and as shear horizontal (SH)
waves. Compared to the horizontal polarisation of SH waves,Lamb waves are vertically polarized.

Figure 2: Simulation of Lamb waves: (a) symmetric S0 mode; (b) antisymmetric A0 mode[1]

1.2

Lamb Wave

Lamb waves are present in plates with traction- free surfaces. Lamb waves are of two basic
types,namely symmetric Lamb-waves modes and antisymmetric Lamb-waves modes. When Lamb
waves are transmit-ted, particles can move in two di erent ways. If the particle motion is symmetric
with respect to the mid surface, it is called symmetric Lamb waves (S 0;S1;S2...). If the particle motion
is anti-symmetric with respect to the mid surface, it is called anti-symmetrical Lamb waves
(A0;A1;A2...). Moreover, a number of modes exist for each type of the Lamb waves. Symmetric and
anti-symmetric Lamb waves have dif-ferent phase and group velocities, as well as distribution of
particle displacement and stress through the plate thickness.
The Lamb-wave modes represent standing waves across the plate thickness and traveling waves
along-the-plate length. Lamb waves are dispersive, i.e., the wave speed varies with frequency.
Figure-3 shows the wave-speed dispersion curves for S 0 and A0 Lamb waves,axial plate waves,
exural plate waves, and Rayleigh waves in a 1-mm aluminum plate.
The gure shows the similarity, at low frequency, between the exural waves and the A 0 Lamb
waves. At low frequency, the wave speeds of the axial waves and the S 0 Lamb-wave mode are also
very close.However, as the frequency increases, both A0 and S0 waves become separated
respectively from exural and axial wave. At high frequencies,the S 0 and the A0 wave speeds coalesce
to the Rayleigh wave ie, At high frequency, the particle motion of Lamb waves becomes restricted to
the proximity of the free surfaces,and thus resembles that of the Rayleigh waves. Thus
2 EXPERIMENT
3

1. Conventional exural waves can be approximated as a low-frequency representation of A 0 Lambwave mode.

2. Conventional axial waves can be represented approximately as the low-frequency

representation of S0 Lamb-wave mode.

3. Rayleigh waves are a high frequency approximation of the S0 and A0 Lamb waves.

Figure 3: Wave speed versus frequency[1]

1.3

Objective of the experiment

The objective of the experiment is to determine the following properties of Lamb waves.

1. Phase velocity of the Lamb wave (c).

dc

2. Group Velocity of the Lamb Wave from the relation cg = c d , where cg is the group velocity, c
is the phase velocity, and is the wavelength of the Lamb wave.

3.

Lamb waves are dispersive, i.e, their phase and group velocities vary with frequency. Phase velocity
and group velocity dispersion curves can be drawn as functions of frequency. Since multiple Lamb
wave modes can exist at a given frequency, a family of dispersion curves is obtained.

12

Experiment

The phase velocity of a wave is the rate at which the phase of the wave propagates in space. This is
the velocity at which the phase of any one frequency component of the wave travels. The phase
velocity of the incident longitudinal wave is then given by

VP =

sin'

where VG is the group velocity of the incident longitudinal wave, V P is the phase velocity of the
incident longitudinal wave and is the angle of incidence of the incident longitudinal wave.
The phase velocity is the speed at which the shape of the wave is moving, i.e., the speed at which
any xed phase of the cycle is displaced. It can also be expressed as
!
K
4

Vp =
3 OBSERVATIONS

where ! is the number of radians of the wave that pass a given location per unit time, and
spatial length of the wave per radian

1 is the
K

The group velocity of a wave is the velocity with which the overall shape of the waves' amplitudesknown

Figure 4: Amplitude wave

as the modulation or envelope of the wavepropagates through space. The amplitude envelope wave
(in-dicated by the dotted lines) has a phase velocity of
VG =

!
K

This is the phase velocity of the amplitude wave, but since each amplitude wave contains a group of
internal waves, this speed is usually called the group velocity.
The normal way to describe the propagation characteristics is by the use of dispersion curves based
on the plate mode phase velocity as a function of the product of frequency times thickness. The dispersion curves are normally labeled as S 0, A0, S1, A1 and so forth, depending on whether the mode is
symmetric or antisymmetric.

Structural Acoustics
Structural acoustics is the study of the mechanical waves in structures and how they interact with and
radiate into adjacent media.
Compressional waves (often referred to as longitudinal waves) expand and contract in the same direction
(or opposite) as the wave motion. The wave equation dictates the motion of the wave in the x direction
2

@w
2

1@w
2

CL @t
where w is the deformation C L is the wave speed. c L is determined by properties (bulk modulus B and
density ) of the structure according to
@y

CL =

(5)

Shear waves occur due to the shear sti ness and follows a similar equation, but with the shear deformation occurring in the transverse direction, perpendicular to the wave motion.
2

@w
@y

1@ w
2

@t2

where Cs is the shear wave speed. The shear wave speed is governed by the shear modulus G which
is less than E and B, making shear waves slower than longitudinal waves.

13

Observations

have increased the frequency of the wave packet by

The existence of the lamb wave in the plate is con 1 KHz and obtained a series of values for the S 0
rmed by the wave pattern generated by the
piezoelec-tric patches placed in the plate. Here we mode and A0 mode of the lamb wave. Since the
maximum frequency

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

is limited to 30KHz in the function generator, we will get only the rst modes in both Symmetric and Anti
Symmetric mode of the lamb wave. There will noises also along with these modes.

Figure 5: Symmetric and Anti symmetric mode

We can plot the S modes and A modes for all the frequency thickness product and the variation of
the group velocity can be plotted versus the frequency thickness product.

14

Results and Discussion

The velocities of the two modes of the waveform can be veri ed using a GUI created by LABORATORY FOR ACTIVE MATERIALS AND SMART STRUCTURES (LAMSS) of South carolina state
University. The WaveFormRevealer 3.0 is a predictive tool to simulate multimode guided waves
interaction with damage. This software allows users to obtain the theoretical solution for dis-persion
curve, tuning curve, frequency components for S 0 and A0 wave modes, and the plate transfer
function.
In the waveform revealer, we need to give the material properties of the plates such as the density of
the plate, Young's modulus of the plate, Poission's ratio and also the geometric properties such as
thickness of the plate. We have to specify the position of the PZT patches in the plate, from which the
group velocity will be computed.

Figure 6: Waveform
Revealer 3.0

5 CONCLUSION

Once all the necessary details are given, the waveform revealer 3.0 will give the dispersed
waveform and the group velocity of the waveform.

Since the thickness of the plate is kept constant in this case, the graph is plotted between group
velocity and the frequency. We increased the frequency of excitation by 1 KHz in each step and got a
set of dispersed waveform results.

Here we got only the rst mode because the the waveform generator frequency is limited to 30 KHz only,
usually when the plate is excited with higher frequencies the mixed modes exists and hence plot will not be
so simple as this, it will have higher modes in symmetric (S 1, S2, .. ) and anti symmetric (A1, A2, .. )
waveforms. Lamb waves are dispersive, which means that their phase and group velocities

Figure 7: Group velocity Vs frequency

vary with frequency. Phase velocity and group velocity dispersion curves can be drawn as functions of
frequency. Because multiple Lamb wave modes can exist at a given frequency, a family of dispersion
curves is obtained.

15

Conclusion

Lamb waves are extremely useful for detection of cracks in thin sheet materials and tubular products.
Extensive developments in the applications of lamb waves provides a foundation for the inspection of
many industrial products in aerospace, pipe and transportation. The generation of lamb waves can be
performed using contact transducers, optical, electromagnetic, magnetostrictive, and air coupled
transducers. The attenuation does not always increase as frequency is increased as in a usual bulk
wave problem.

6 References
References
[1] Zhongqing Su, Lin Ye., "Identi cation of Damage Using Lamb Waves: From Fundamentals to Applications."

[2] http://www.me.sc.edu/research/lamss/