Lamb waves have been widely studied in structural integrity evaluation during the past decades with their low-attenuation and multi-defects sensitive nature. The performance of the evaluation has close relationship with the vibration property and the frequency of Lamb waves signals. Influenced by the nature of Lamb waves and the environment, the received signals may be difficult to interpret that limits the performance of the detection. So pure Lamb waves mode emitting and high-resolution signals acquisition play important roles in Lamb waves structural integrity evaluation. In this chapter, the basic theory of Lamb waves nature and some environment factors that should be considered in structural integrity evaluation are introduced. Three kinds of typical transduces used for specific Lamb waves mode emitting and sensing are briefly introduced. Then the development of techniques to improve the interpretability of signals are discussed, including the waveform modulation techniques, multi-scale analysis techniques and the temperature effect compensation techniques are summarized.
Part of the book: Structural Health Monitoring from Sensing to Processing
The wavefield of Lamb waves is yielded by the feature of plate-like structures. And many defects imaging techniques and intelligent recognition algorithms have been developed for defects location, sizing and recognition through analyzing the parameters of received Lamb waves signals including the arrival time, attenuation, amplitude and phase, etc. In this chapter, we give a briefly review about the defects imaging techniques and the intelligent recognition algorithms. Considering the available parameters of Lamb waves signals and the setting of detection/monitoring systems, we roughly divide the defect location and sizing techniques into four categories, including the sparse array imaging techniques, the tomography techniques, the compact array techniques, and full wavefield imaging techniques. The principle of them is introduced. Meanwhile, the intelligent recognition techniques based on various of intelligent recognition algorithms that have been widely used to analyze Lamb waves signals in the research of defect recognition are reviewed, including the support vector machine, Bayesian methodology, and the neural networks.
Part of the book: Structural Health Monitoring from Sensing to Processing