Approach to Lamb Wave Lateral Crack Quantification in Elastic Plate Based on Reflection and Transmission Coefficients Surfaces

Ultrasonic guided wave is promising in structure integrity management, but there is still much to learn about it because of its complex mechanism. Defect sizing or quantification is very important for structure inspection using ultrasonic guided waves, and this inverse problem is also very difficult to solve. The work presented in this article aims to resolve the lateral crack quantification problem in the inspection of thin elastic plate using Lamb wave. First, two-dimensional (2D) boundary element method (BEM) simulation was used to study the interaction of one chosen pure mode Lamb wave with lateral crack defect, and this could be defined as the forward problem. Then reflection and transmission coefficients surfaces were built from the results of the numerical simulation. Finally, an approach for lateral crack quantification based on these reflection and transmission coefficients surfaces was proposed. The quantification examples show that the presented approach gives acceptable accuracy. Some limitations of this approach are also discussed.