Excitation series design and pulse compression synthesis for high-resolution Lamb wave inspection

Lamb wave pulse compression is a promising technique for ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring, in which the excitation waveform is designed to exhibit attractive auto-correlation characteristics including short main-lobe width and small side-lobe amplitude. However, narrowing main-lobe will increase side-lobe amplitude, and vice versa. Conventional time windowing technique is a balance between main-lobe width and side-lobe amplitude. An improvement over time windowing is proposed using pulse compression synthesis method. In this method, a series of excitation waveforms are used to actuate Lamb waves, each response is processed by pulse compression, and all the compression signals are summed together. The excitation series are constructed as linear chirps weighted with different combinations of rectangular and Hanning window functions. The selection of the combination coefficients is optimized to ensure best signal summation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an experiment, and the robustness to inaccuracy in dispersion compensation is also evaluated. Application of the proposed method for damage detection is demonstrated by a further experiment.