Focusing of Time Reversal Lamb Waves and Its Applications in Structural Health Monitoring

The focusing of time reversal acoustic fields for dispersive and multimodal Lamb waves is theoretically investigated and experimentally verified. It is demonstrated that the time reversal Lamb wave signal will reach the maximum amplitude when the observation point is located at the damage location. Based on the time reversal focusing theory, a damage imaging method is proposed for structural health monitoring using Lamb waves. The experiments employ a transducer network consisting of four piezoelectric transducers as actuators and as well sensors for excitation and measurement of Lamb waves. The results show that this method is able to accurately predict damage location and provides an estimation of the possible area even for damage close to one of the transducers or even slightly outside the transducer network.