Calculation of electromechanical coupling coefficient of Lamb waves in multilayered plates

Abstract

Two methods have been always used to calculate the electromechanical coupling coefficient of a Lamb wave in a multilayered plate: one is an approximate method using the acoustic velocity difference under different electric boundary conditions and the other is the Green’s function method. The Green’s function method is more accurate but more complicated, because an 8 N-order matrix is used for calculating the electromechanical coupling coefficient of the Lamb wave in an N-layered plate, which induces great computation loads and some calculation deviations. In this paper, a transfer matrix method is used for calculating the electromechanical coupling coefficient of Lamb waves in a multilayered plate, in which only an 8-order matrix is needed regardless of the number of layers of the plate. The results show that the transfer matrix method can obtain the same accuracy as those by the Green’s function method, but the computation load and deviation are greatly decreased by avoiding the use of a high order matrix used in the Green’s function method.