HYBRID SAFE/FE SIMULATION OF INSPECTIONS OF ELASTIC WAVEGUIDES CONTAINING SEVERAL LOCAL DISCONTINUITIES OR DEFECTS.

Two previously proposed formulations to simulate nondestructive inspection by guided waves (GW) are extended to deal with (possibly multiple) scattering by several discontinuities or defects. They hybridize models for transducer diffraction effect (radiation, reception), for scattering by local discontinuities (by a finite element technique with specific boundary conditions minimizing the mesh size) and semi analytic finite elements for the guided propagation in homogeneous guides in between. The paper derives the formulations; examples illustrate their interest in NDT simulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]