Time–transient response for ultrasonic guided waves propagating in damped cylinders

Herein, an enhanced spectral finite element (SFE) formulation to calculate the time–transient response in cylindrical waveguides is proposed. The original aspect over SFE-based formulations consists in the possibility to account for the effect of material absorption, i.e. guided waves attenuation, on the calculation of the time–transient response.First, the damped steady-state response is constructed by a weighted superposition of the waveguide modal properties obtained from the spectral decomposition of the governing wave equation. To this purpose an enhanced spectrally formulated finite element is developed, in which material damping is included allowing for complex stress–strain viscoelastic constitutive relations in force of the correspondence principle. Dispersive modal properties for the damped waveguide (phase velocity, energy velocity, attenuation and wavestructures) follow straightforwardly by simple formulae. Next, the frequency response of the problem is calculated by weighting the modal data and the spectrum of the applied time-dependent force via Cauchy residue theorem. Finally, the inverse Fourier transform of the frequency response leads to the time–transient response for propagative damped guided waves.The approach is not restricted to any anisotropy degree, holds for any linear viscoelastic constitutive relation that can be characterized and formulated in the frequency domain and it can be applied to SFE formulations for arbitrary cross-section waveguides. A study on guided waves propagating in a scheduled 4.in-40 ANSI steel pipe is presented, where the steel is considered first as perfectly elastic and then as an hysteretic viscoelastic medium, in order to show the effect of material absorption on the time–transient response.