Determination of thickness and elastic constants of aluminum plates from full-field wavelength measurements of single-mode narrowband Lamb waves.

A method based on fitting the theoretical dispersion curves of Lamb waves to experimental data is presented to determine the thickness and two independent elastic constants of aluminum plates a few millimeters thick. The waves are generated by means of the wedge method using a narrowband source, selecting the wedge angle and the acoustic frequency f so that mainly one mode is excited. A self-developed pulsed electronic speckle pattern interferometry system renders a two dimensional map of the out-of-plane acoustic displacement field at the plate surface, which allows an accurate measurement of the acoustic wavelength lambda(1). For any mode, the relation between lambda(1) and f depends on the three unknown parameters, so at least three experimental measurements (lambda(1i),f(i)) with different frequencies and/or different modes are required to calculate them. The suitability of different Lamb modes to determine each parameter when the others are known is studied, as well as the conditions that the experimental set of values must fulfill to calculate all three parameters. Numerous Lamb modes at different frequencies are generated in each plate, and a fitting is made based on the minimization of the error function, resulting in an accuracy better than 1%.