Elastic waves guided by a welded joint in a plate
Open Access
- 15 April 2009
- journal article
- Published by The Royal Society in Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
- Vol. 465 (2107), 2053-2068
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2009.0010
Abstract
The inspection of large areas of complex structures is a growing interest for industry. An experimental observation on a large welded plate found that the weld can concentrate and guide the energy of a guided wave travelling along the direction of the weld. This is attractive for non-destructive evaluation (NDE) since it offers the potential to quickly inspect for defects such as cracking or corrosion along long lengths of welds. In this paper, a two-dimensional semi-analytical finite-element (SAFE) method is applied to provide a modal study of the elastic waves that are guided by the welded joint in a plate. This brings understanding to the compression wave that was previously observed in the experiment. However, during the study, a shear weld-guided mode, which is non-leaky and almost non-dispersive, has also been discovered. Its characteristics are particularly attractive for NDE, so this is a significant new finding. The properties for both the compression and the shear mode are discussed and compared, and the physical reason for the energy trapping phenomena is then explained. Experiments have been undertaken to validate the existence of the shear weld-guided mode and the accuracy of the FE model, showing very good results.Keywords
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