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A method for the measurement of the phase and group velocities of guided acoustic waves is presented. For this purpose, a unique capability of a self-developed double-pulsed TV holography system to create movies of the propagation of guided acoustic wavetrains is used. Thereby, the experimental visualization of the evolution of Lamb and Rayleigh wavetrains in aluminum plates is shown, including several movies that illustrate different dispersive behaviors. Each movie shows the propagation of a narrowband wavetrain with a central frequency in the order of 1 MHz that consists of a carrier moving with the phase velocity, modulated by an envelope moving with the group velocity. Each snapshot is a two-dimensional map of the instantaneous out-of-plane displacement field of the surface points of the plate, with amplitudes in the order of several nanometers, acquired with the double-pulsed TV holography system. Then, by repeating the acquisition with successively increasing delays between the generation and detection instants, a sequence of maps is obtained from which a movie is composed. The phase and group velocities of the waves are accurately measured from the movies, yielding values that match well with the reference values for the same plates obtained from independent measurements.

A method based on fitting the theoretical dispersion curves of Lamb waves to experimental data is presented to determine the thickness and two independent elastic constants of aluminum plates a few millimeters thick. The waves are generated by means of the wedge method using a narrowband source, selecting the wedge angle and the acoustic frequency f so that mainly one mode is excited. A self-developed pulsed electronic speckle pattern interferometry system renders a two dimensional map of the out-of-plane acoustic displacement field at the plate surface, which allows an accurate measurement of the acoustic wavelength lambda(1). For any mode, the relation between lambda(1) and f depends on the three unknown parameters, so at least three experimental measurements (lambda(1i),f(i)) with different frequencies and/or different modes are required to calculate them. The suitability of different Lamb modes to determine each parameter when the others are known is studied, as well as the conditions that the experimental set of values must fulfill to calculate all three parameters. Numerous Lamb modes at different frequencies are generated in each plate, and a fitting is made based on the minimization of the error function, resulting in an accuracy better than 1%.