Accurate knowledge of dispersion relations is of vital importance for Lamb wave-based damage detection. In this paper, an experimental technique is proposed to obtain the Lamb waves phase velocity dispersion without prior knowledge of material properties. It requires measurements at only two neighboring positions, and can evaluate phase velocity dispersion over a wide frequency range. In that technique, the short-time chirp-Fourier transform is first applied to the Lamb wave signals to achieve a concentrated time–frequency representation. On this basis, ridge tracking is completed and the group delay (GD) of the interested modes is estimated accurately. Subsequently, the Vold–Kalman filter is introduced to extract these wave modes, and the instantaneous phase is estimated from each individual wave mode via Hilbert transform. Lastly, the phase velocity is obtained as a function of the propagation distance, GD and phase shift. The proposed technique is investigated in two different mediums: simulated signals as Lamb wave propagating in an aluminum plate and experimental signals as that in a carbon fiber-reinforced polymer laminate. The results demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency.

The accurate information of Lamb wave packets, such as amplitude, time of flight, and waveform, are essential for damage detection and evaluation. Due to the dispersive, multimodal, and attenuative characteristics of Lamb waves propagating in viscoelastic media, the desired mode component is difficult to be extracted from response signals. To address this issue, a technique based on the viscoelastic propagation model of Lamb waves is proposed in this article. Different from the conventional frequency–wavenumber domain filtering, the proposed technique achieves mode extraction by estimating the parameters of the viscoelastic propagation model, that is, complex amplitude a_m( r, ω) and effective complex wavenumber ξ_m( ω). Benefiting from that, it enables to decompose and reconstruct the desired mode from spatial–temporal measurement data. First, the frequency-dependent effective complex wavenumbers are extracted using the matrix pencil method, where the real parts represent the dispersion and the imaginary parts represent the effective attenuation. After that, the complex amplitudes are obtained by solving linear least-square equations. Finally, the complex amplitude, effective complex wavenumber, and frequency range of the desired mode are picked out to reconstruct the mode component in the time domain. The finite element simulation and experimental results verify the effectiveness of our technique. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed technique in noisy circumstances is analyzed through synthetic signals, which shows a small reconstruction error and a good convergence.

Lamb wave testing is promising for damage detection and evaluation in large-area structures. The dispersion of Lamb waves is often unavoidable, restricting testing resolution and making the signal hard to interpret. A smoothed Capon algorithm is proposed in this paper to estimate the accurate path length of each wave packet. In the algorithm, frequency domain whitening is firstly used to obtain the transfer function in the bandwidth of the excitation pulse. Subsequently, wavenumber domain smoothing is employed to reduce the correlation between wave packets. Finally, the path lengths are determined by distance domain searching based on the Capon algorithm. Simulations are applied to optimize the number of smoothing times. Experiments are performed on an aluminum plate consisting of two simulated defects. The results demonstrate that spatial resolution is improved significantly by the proposed algorithm.