Damage Identification in Composite Materials Using Lamb Wave Method

Composite materials are gaining acceptance and demand in several commercial markets including sporting goods, construction and transportation. For many of these applications however, such as aircraft, without a reliable damage detection approach, the total cost of ownership may become a limiting factor for the structure's use. Several non-destructive evaluation techniques are compared on the basis of their strengths and weaknesses for in- service testing of composite materials. A procedure has been formulated for identifying and locating of damage in structures using Lamb wave propagation parameters as a base of the health monitoring of composite materials. The main focus was placed on ultrasonic based Lamb waves propagation method.The Ultrasonic based Lamb waves propagation method is totally a new approach for the problem of overlapping of the modes in the analysis of Lamb waves.