Measurement of beating effects in narrowband multimode Lamb wave displacement fields in aluminum plates by pulsed TV holography

Abstract

Narrowband ultrasonic surface acoustic waves are of the greatest current interest for the nondestructive testing of thinwalled members and shell structures like plates, pipes, bridge girders, cans and many others. The measurement and characterization of ultrasonic displacement fields of Lamb waves by pulsed TV holography (TVH) is presented. Narrowband ultrasound is generated in a few millimeters thick aluminum plate by the prismatic coupling block method using a tone-burst excitation signal in the range of lMHz. At this frequency, the plate supports only a few Lamb wave modes, mainly the A0 and S0 ones. The simultaneous presence of these modes produces a beating clearly detectable as a spatial amplitude modulation. Our self-developed TVH system performs the optical phase evaluation by the Spatial Fourier Transform Method and renders the instantaneous out-of plane mechanical displacement field along the whole inspected area. From this field, the wavenumber of each Lamb mode can be obtained and, by combining them with the value of the ultrasound frequency and with the Rayleigh-Lamb theoretical frequency spectrum, information about the elastic constants of the specimen material is obtained.