Simulation of Lamb wave’s interactions with transverse internal defects in an elastic plate

Lamb wave’s interactions with transverse internal defects in an elastic plate are investigated in this paper to help practical inspection work with guided wave. A 2D frequency domain hybrid boundary element method approach previously mainly used to study Lamb wave’s interactions with external defects in elastic plates is adopted in this work and extended to study the cases of internal defects. Simulation examples are presented to illustrate the reflection and transmission coefficients’ variations with various parameters including defect’s height, width, testing fd for internal symmetrical and non-symmetrical cracks, with symmetry defined with respect to the middle plane of the plate. This simulation could be a valuable tool for the research of Lamb wave’s applications in nondestructive testing (NDT) field, as the problem of internal defects could be difficult to study experimentally because of the inconvenience in machining internal defects in a real plate.

Research highlights
► Extending existing hybrid BEM formulation.
► Studying fully Lamb wave’s interactions with internal defects in an elastic plate.
► New results different from the work in the literature are presented.