ACOUSTOELASTIC LAMB WAVE PROPAGATION IN A HOMOGENEOUS, ISOTROPIC ALUMINUM PLATE.

The effect of stress on Lamb wave propagation is relevant to both nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring because of changes in received signals due to both the associated strain and the acoustoelastic effect. A homogeneous plate that is initially isotropic becomes anisotropic under uniaxial stress, and dispersion of propagating waves becomes directionally dependent. The problem is similar to Lamb wave propagation in an anisotropic plate, except the fourth order tensor in the resulting wave equation does not have the same symmetry as that for the unstressed anisotropic plate, and the constitutive equation relating incremental stress to incremental strain is more complicated. Here we consider the theory of acoustoelastic Lamb wave propagation and show how dispersion curves shift anisotropically for an aluminum plate under uniaxial tension. Theoretical predictions of changes in phase velocity as a function of propagation direction are compared to experimental results for a single wave mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]