Chirp excitation of ultrasonic guided waves

Most ultrasonic guided wave methods require tone burst excitations to achieve some degree of mode purity while maintaining temporal resolution. In addition, it is often desirable to acquire data using multiple frequencies, particularly during method development when the best frequency for a specific application is not known. However, this process is inconvenient and time-consuming, particularly if extensive signal averaging at each excitation frequency is required to achieve a satisfactory signal-to-noise ratio. Both acquisition time and data storage requirements may be prohibitive if responses from many narrowband tone burst excitations are measured. Here chirp excitations are utilized to address the need to both test at multiple frequencies and achieve a high signal-to-noise ratio to minimize acquisition time. A broadband chirp is used to acquire data at a wide range of frequencies, and deconvolution is applied to extract multiple narrowband responses. After optimizing the frequency and duration of the desired tone burst excitation, a long-time narrowband chirp is used as the actual excitation, and the desired tone burst response is similarly extracted during post-processing. Results are shown that demonstrate the efficacy of both broadband and narrowband chirp excitations. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.