Reconstruction of Dispersive Lamb Waves in Time Plates Using a Time Reversal Method

Time reversal (TR) of nondispersive body waves has been used in many applications including ultrasonic NDE. However, the study of the TR method for Lamb waves on thin structures is not well established. In this paper, the full reconstruction of the input signal is investigated for dispersive Lamb waves by introducing a time reversal operator based on the Mindlin plate theory. A broadband and a narrowband input waveform are employed to reconstruct the A0 mode of Lamb wave propagations. Due to the frequency dependence of the TR process of Lamb waves, different frequency components of the broadband excitation are scaled differently during the time reversal process and the original input signal cannot be fully restored. This is the primary reason for using a narrowband excitation to enhance the flaw detectability