Microcrack localization using a collinear Lamb wave frequency-mixing technique in a thin plate

Abstract

A novel Lamb wave frequency-mixing technique is proposed for locating microcracks in a thin plate, which does not require the resonance condition of Lamb wave mixing and can accurately locate the microcracks through only one-time sensing. Based on the bilinear stress-strain constitutive model, a two-dimensional finite element (FE) model is built to investigate the frequency-mixing response induced by the interaction between two primary Lamb waves and a microcrack. When twoprimary Lamb waves of A0 and S0 modes with different frequencies excited on the same side of the plate simultaneously impinge on the examined microcrack, under the modulation of the contact acoustic nonlinearity, the microcrack itself can be deemed as the secondary sound source and it will radiate the Lamb waves of new combined frequencies. Based on the timeof flight of the generated A0 mode at difference frequency, an indicator named normalized amplitude index (NAI) is defined to directly locate the multi-microcracks in the given plate. It is found that the number and location of the microcracks can be intuitively visualized by using the NAI based frequency-mixing technique. It is also demonstrated that the proposed frequency mixing technique is a promising approach for the microcrack localization.