Mode Recognition of Lamb Wave Detecting Signals in Metal Plate Using the Hilbert-Huang Transform Method

Abstract

The dispersion and multiple modes characteristics which exist in the propagation of Lamb waves (LW) in metal plates make it extremely hard to analyze and recognize the detection echo signals of defects. As a newly developed time-frequency analysis method in recent years, Hilbert-Huang transform (HHT) is one of the powerful tools to analyze non-stationary signals. The experimental LW detecting system for single aluminum plate is setup in this work, and the LW detecting signals are analyzed by HHT. The overlapped LW detecting signals of different modes are recognized by the means of extracting flight time of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) after Hilbert transform (HT). The experiment results, agreeing well with the theoretical analysis, indicate that the HHT method can clearly recognize overlapped LW detecting signals of different modes in metal plates, but could hardly recognize that of the same mode. HHT can be an effective method to recognize LW detecting signals of different modes in metal plates.