Dispersive Wave Analysis Using the Chirplet Transform

Time-frequency representations (TFR) are a widely used tool to analyze signals of guided waves such as Lamb waves. As a consequence of the uncertainty principle, however, the resolution in time and frequency is limited for all existing TFR methods. Due to the multi-modal and dispersive character of Lamb waves, displacement or energy related quantities can only be allocated to individual modes when they are well-separated in the time-frequency plane.The chirplet transform (CT) has been introduced as a generalization of both the wavelet and Short-time Fourier transform (STFT). It offers additional degrees of freedom to adjust time-frequency atoms which can be exploited in a model-based approach to match the group delay of individual modes. Thus, more exact allocation of quantities of interest is possible.The objective of this research is to use a previously developed adaptive algorithm based on the CT for nondestructive evaluation. Both numerically and experimentally generated data for a single aluminum plate is analyzed to determine the accuracy and robustness of the new method in comparison the classical STFT