Detection and localization of corrosion using identical-group- velocity Lamb wave modes

Multimodal is the prominent characteristic of Lamb waves, which means a variety of Lamb wave modes propagate in the structure and each of them has unique propagation behaviour. For a wideband multimodal Lamb wave signal, it is possible that many different modes share the same group velocity at some frequency points, while their dispersion behaviours change differently to thickness variation. In this study, the diversity and difference of the interaction between the corrosion and Lamb wave modes are investigated. On this basis, a corrosion index (CI) is established to evaluate the time gap between two modes at their identical group velocity points. The simulation results show that the CI value of a corroded path is obviously larger than that of a healthy path, indicating the presence of the damage, which is independent of any base-line signal. Furthermore, the new reconstruction algorithm for the probabilistic inspection of damage (RAPID) was proposed, where the signal difference coefficient was replaced by the CI to visualise damage location. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multimodal Lamb wave baseline-free damage detection method.