Plotting Lamb waves dispersion curves of an aluminum plate by the Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) method and comparison with analytical curves

Abstract

It is well known that the propagation of Lamb waves in elastic solid medias depends on the frequency and on the material properties, but it does not depend on the propagation direction in isotropic medias and gives rise to two basic types of modes, symmetric and antisymmetric ones. This paper presents an application of the semi-analytical finite element (SAFE) method on an isotropic aluminum plate of thickness e = 2mm. The main goal of this paper is to make a quantitative evaluation of the SAFE method by carrying out the following tasks: a) calculation of the dispersion curves (wavenumber, phase velocity, group velocity, b) calculation of the relative error and validation of the proposed algorithm, c) comparison between the curves obtained by SAFE method on those obtained by Bisection method. It should be noted here that our study is restricted on the propagative modes.