Guided lamb waves and L-SAFT processing technique for enhanced detection and imaging of corrosion defects in plates with small depth-to-wavelength ratio.

The Lamb synthetic aperture focusing technique (L-SAFT) imaging algorithm in the Fourier domain is used to produce Lamb wave imaging in plates while considering the wave dispersive properties. This artificial focusing technique produces easy-to-interpret, modified B-scan type images of Lamb wave inspection results. The high level of sensitivity of Lamb waves combined with the L-SAFT algorithm allows one to detect and to produce images of corrosion defects with small depth-to-wavelength ratio. This paper briefly presents the formulated L-SAFT algorithm used for Lamb waves and, in more details, some experimental results obtained on simulated and real corrosion pits, demonstrating the benefit of combining L-SAFT with pulse-echo Lamb wave inspection. The obtained images of the real corrosion defects showed detection of pits with a depth-to-wavelength ratio of approximately 2/11.