Lamb wave propagation using Wave Finite Element Method

Abstract

Some of the available techniques for Lamb wave propagation simulation are the Finite Element Method (FEM), the Boundary Element Method and the Finite Difference Method. The FEM is the best method when complex damage, geometry or boundary is involved. However, high Lamb wave frequency requires very small element size thus high computational cost in FEM analysis. By using the existence of periodicity in plates, an attempt to reduce this computational cost is done using Wave FEM. The applicability of this method to model Lamb wave propagation in plate is first assessed in this paper for the 1-D wave propagation and compared with FEM explicit method.