Measurement of shallow defects using noncontact broadband leaky Lamb wave produced by pulsed laser with ultrasound microphone

Abstract

In this study, we propose a convenient noncontact laser ultrasonic system to detect small cracks and estimate the wall-thinning defects of thin plates. The system uses an ultrasound microphone to detect the energy leaked from the broadband Lamb-wave propagation. The broadband characteristics of this wave, produced by a pulsed laser, are used to measure the wavenumber. The cumulative standing-wave energy (CSWE) method that uses a traveling wave is implemented to verify the feasibility of the ultrasound microphone. The excitation energy of the pulsed laser was insufficient compared with that of the continuous-wave contact actuator. Therefore, a modified local wavenumber estimation (LWE) method is proposed, which reconstructs several LWE images at various frequencies. These images are averaged to calculate thicknesses of the plate and defects, by using the wavenumber–thickness relationship. The method has an error of 2.84% and 7.7% for the thickness of the plate and defect area, respectively.