Determination of Elastic Properties in a Plate by Lamb Wave Analysis and Particle Swarm Optimisation

AbstractTraditionally dispersion characteristics for any plate structure are evaluated using the Rayleigh-Lamb solution and an assumption that the material properties are known. In cases where the material properties may be difficult to obtain the opposite is proposed. Specifically, the dispersive characteristics of Lamb waves may be used to extract the mechanical properties of a given test coupon. This paper presents a particle swarm optimisation (PSO) methodology to achieve this. The results from a series of tests on an aluminium coupon were used to validate the approach. The PSO was found to successfully match dispersion characteristics identified in a 2D FFT