Imaging and suppression of Lamb modes using adaptive beamforming

Lamb waves have proven to be very useful for plate inspection because large areas of a plate can be covered from a fixed position. This capability makes them suitable for both inspection and structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. During the last decade, research on the use of active arrays in combination with beamforming techniques has shown that a fixed array can be used to perform omni-directional monitoring of a plate structure. The dispersion and multiple propagating modes are issues that need to be addressed when working with Lamb waves. Previous work has mainly focused on conventional, delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming, while reducing the effects of multiple modes through frequency selectivity and transducer design. The paper describes an adaptive beamforming technique using a minimum variance distortionless response beamforming (MVBF) approach for spatial Lamb wave filtering with multiple-transmitter-multiple-receiver arrays. Dispersion is compensated for by using theoretically calculated dispersion curves. Simulations are used for evaluating the performance of the technique for suppression of interfering Lamb modes, both with and without the presence of mode conversion using different array configurations. A simple simulation model of the plate is used to compare the performance of different sizes of active arrays. An aluminum plate with artificial defects is used for the experimental evaluation. The results show that the MVBF approach performs a lot better in terms of resolution and suppression of interfering modes than the widely used standard beamformer.