Guided wave beam steering from omni-directional transducer arrays

The paper describes beam steering algorithms for processing data from omni-directional guided wave transducer arrays for the rapid inspection of plate structures. A basic phased addition algorithm is presented that can be applied to any array geometry, but which only produces acceptable results for arrays with a large number of elements. An improved algorithm that includes deconvolution in the angular domain is presented that enables good results to be obtained from arrays with far fewer elements. Both algorithms are applied to experimental data and the results compared.