Experimental and Numerical Study of Nonlinear Lamb Waves of a Low-Frequency <i>S</i>₀ Mode in Plates with Quadratic Nonlinearity

Abstract

This paper investigates the propagation of low-frequency S0 mode Lamb waves in plates with quadratic nonlinearity through numerical simulations and experimental measurements. Both numerical and experimental results manifest distinct ultrasonic nonlinear behavior which is mainly presented by the second harmonics. Meanwhile, we find that both the acoustic nonlinearity parameter and dispersion distance show the exponential decay trend with the increase of frequency-thickness. Moreover, the results reveal that the frequency is key to affect the acoustic nonlinearity parameter and dispersion distance with the same frequency-thickness. This study theoretically and experimentally reveals that nonlinear Lamb waves of the low-frequency S0 mode are feasible to quantitatively identify material weak nonlinearity in plates.

Keywords

• ultrasonic nonlinearity
• lamb waves
• <i>S</i>₀ mode
• numerical simulation
• experiment