Pulse compression and dispersion compensation for high- resolution Lamb wave inspection

Abstract

The dispersion of ultrasonic guided waves causes the energy of a signal to spread out in space and time as it propagates, which decreases the performance for damage detection significantly. A lot of signal processing methods have been proposed to reduce the effect of dispersion for this reason. In this paper, with the aim of developing an efficient methodology for high resolution Lamb wave inspection, a pulse compression and dispersion compensation method is established. In this method, broadband excitation and pulse compression technique are introduced to reconstruct the transform function with a high SNR. Subsequently, a scheme is established to alleviate the dispersion effects by performing compensation on the original narrowband excitation signals, and thus the time duration of received wave packet can be compressed during the extracting process. Finally, Numerical simulation and experiment are carried on aluminum specimens to investigate the behavior of the proposed method.