Sparse recovery of the multimodal and dispersive characteristics of Lamb waves

Guided waves in plates, known as Lamb waves, are characterized by complex, multimodal, and frequency dispersive wave propagation, which distort signals and make their analysis difficult. Estimating these multimodal and dispersive characteristics from experimental data becomes a difficult, underdetermined inverse problem. To accurately and robustly recover these multimodal and dispersive properties, this paper presents a methodology referred to as sparse wavenumber analysis based on sparse recovery methods. By utilizing a general model for Lamb waves, waves propagating in a plate structure, and robust l(1) optimization strategies, sparse wavenumber analysis accurately recovers the Lamb wave's frequency-wavenumber representation with a limited number of surface mounted transducers. This is demonstrated with both simulated and experimental data in the presence of multipath reflections. With accurate frequency-wavenumber representations, sparse wavenumber synthesis is then used to accurately remove multipath interference in each measurement and predict the responses between arbitrary points on a plate. (C) 2013 Acoustical Society of America. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4799805]