Laminate composites which are widely used in the aeronautical industry, are usually subjected to frequency variation of environmental temperature and excessive humidity in the in-service environment. The thermal fatigue and moisture absorption in composites may induce material degradation. There is a demand to investigate the coupling damages mechanism and characterize the degradation evolution...

This brief note reports on a study that applies the reassigned spectrogram (the reassigned energy density spectrum of the short-time Fourier transform [STFT]) to develop the dispersion curves for multimode Lamb waves propagating in an aluminum plate. The proposed procedure first uses the spectrogram to operate on a single, laser-generated and detected waveform to develop the dispersion relation...

Cost-effective and reliable damage detection is critical for the utilization of composite materials. This paper presents part of an experimental and analytical survey of candidate methods for in-situ damage detection of composite materials. Experimental results are presented for the application of Lamb wave techniques to quasi-isotropic graphite/epoxy thin coupons and sandwich beams containing ...

[1] Long‐period harmonic Rayleigh waves were observed on seismometers during the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines. The amplitude spectrum of the Rayleigh waves shows two distinct peaks at periods of about 230 and 270 s. In the Earth’s atmosphere, long‐wavelength standing acoustic waves are bounded in a low‐sound‐velocity channel between the thermosphere and the ground. The Rayleigh...

Lamb waves at ultrasonic frequencies travel with little attenuation in thin elastic plates, and we demonstrate their use in pulse-echo behavior to monitor plate integrity. We envision using a single PZT wafer-type transducer to generate waves and to receive reflections from distant flaw or boundary locations. However, Lamb waves generally have multiple modes, each of them highly dispersive, and...

The development of effective damage imaging and characterization tools is a challenging task because of the dispersive and multi-modal nature of Lamb waves. An additional problem is the need for baseline data that is required by a number of existing techniques. This paper presents the development of imaging algorithms applied to filtered wavefield data received from piezoelectric disc sources. ...