Title: Lamb wave topological imaging for blind hole defects in isotropic plates

Author(s): ZHANG Haiyan; LIU Fanjie; FAN Guopeng; ZHU Wenfa; CHAI Xiaodong;

Affiliation(s): School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University; School of Urban Railway Transportation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science

Abstract: The research aims at validating the ability of topological imaging to blind holes in isotropic plates using Lamb waves. Due to the defect is not symmetric around the midplane of the plate, the effect of Lamb mode conversion will have to be taken into account. The imaging method is based on two computations of ultrasonic fields, one forward and one adjoint, performed for the defect-free reference medium. The excited signal and scattered Lamb waves caused by the blind hole are used as emitting sources to compute the forward problem and the adjoint problem, respectively. With the help of the finite element simulations, the natural refocusing process of the multimode Lamb waves at the defect location is visually demonstrated by the transient acoustic field snapshots at the different moments to strengthen the physical mechanism of the topological imaging method. The numerical results demonstrate that topological imaging has relatively stronger applicability to the blind hole in contrast to classical Delay And Sum (DAS) method and Time Reversal (TR) method. The topological imaging could handle complex Lamb wave signals containing mode conversions without the imaging quality being affected. The proposed imaging method presents a certain developing potential for detecting and imaging asymmetric defects in plate-like configurations using Lamb waves.