Simulation of Lamb Wave Propagation to Predict Damage Detection in Thin Walled Composite Structures

Piezoelectric transducers have proved to be useful when generating Lamb waves in an integrated health monitoring solution. Some of the challenges though, when dealing with Lamb waves, are being able to understand their propagation in complex media, processing the signals picked up by sensors and predicting the effect of damage depending on its type and extent. Developments are presented made with Finite Element Modelling to simulate Lamb wave propagation in structures. A tool has been developed to couple implicit and explicit schemes to handle electromechanical equations in an implicit dynamic model, and the wave propagation with explicit time integration. Using this tool, different damage types and scenarios can be tested rapidly and compared to reference or other damaged cases. With this, certain aspects related to processing of data can be studied in order to create a global health monitoring approach of aeronautical structures.