Dispersion analysis of Lamb waves in composite laminates based on reverberation-ray matrix method

On the basis of reverberation-ray theory, this article presents the development of a new mode tracing method which can be used to efficiently calculate dispersion curves of Lamb waves in composite laminates. The dispersion relations are built by reverberation-ray formulas in three-dimensional Cartesian coordinate, and the transcendental equations are numerically solved by the improved mode-tracing method. In contrast to conventional mode-tracing method, a slope control algorithm is adopted in the new approach to avoid the switch of tracer from one mode to another around the cross point of dispersion curves, which solves the problem of solution loss. Numerical verifications are conducted to assess the performance of the proposed method and the good agreement with the existing experiment results are demonstrated to show that the proposed method is accurate, efficient and robust for the dispersion analysis of Lamb waves in composite laminates with arbitrary lay-up.