Experimental study of the acoustoelastic Lamb wave in thin plates

Many factors can cause residual stresses in industry, like rolling, welding and coating. Residual stresses can have both benefits and shortcomings on components, so it is important to find the residual stresses out and enhance its benefits part and get rid of its harmful part. There are many methods for residual stresses detection and ultrasonic method turns out to be a good one for it is nondestructive, relative cheap and portable. The critically refracted longitudinal (LCR) wave is widely used for it is regarded most sensitive to stress and less sensitive to texture which can influence detection results. Ultrasonic methods for residual stresses detection are based on time of flight (TOF) measurement, but because the measurement should reach nanosecond to show stress change, there are many other factors that can influence TOF, like temperature, texture of the components and even the thickness of the couplant. So increasing the TOF’s sensitivity to stress is very important. In this paper the relationships between velocity and frequency are studied experimentally[6] for different Lamb modes, under various stress loadings. The result shows that the sensitivity of different modes various a lot, the A1 mode is the most sensitivity, compared to S0, S1 and A0 modes; if the force is added to 100 MPa, the change stress of A1 mode can be as large to 80 m/s, which is about 10 times more sensitive than the traditional bulk wave. This makes it as a good choice for residual stress detection