Effects of adhesive, host plate, transducer and excitation parameters on time reversibility of ultrasonic Lamb waves

To develop an effective baseline-free damage detection strategy using the time-reversal process (TRP) of Lamb waves in thin walled structures, it is essential to develop a good understanding of the parameters that affect the amplitude dispersion and consequently the time reversibility of the Lamb wave signal. In this paper, the effects of adhesive layer between the transducers and the host plate, the tone burst count of the excitation signal, the plate thickness, and the piezoelectric transducer thickness on the time reversibility of Lamb waves in metallic plates are studied using experiments and finite element simulations. The effect of adhesive layer on the forward propagation response and frequency tuning has been also studied. The results show that contrary to the general expectation, the quality of the reconstruction of the input signal after the TRP may increase with the increase in the adhesive layer thickness at certain frequency ranges. Similarly, an increase in the tone burst count resulting in a narrowband signal does not necessarily enhance the time reversibility at all frequencies, contrary to what has been reported earlier. For a given plate thickness, a thinner transducer yields a better reconstruction, but for a given transducer thickness, the similarity of the reconstructed signal may not be always higher for a thicker plate. It is important to study these effects to achieve the best quality of reconstruction in undamaged plates, for effective damage detection.