Evaluation of Early-Stage Fatigue Damage in Metal Plates Using Quasi-Static Components of Low-Frequency Lamb Waves

Nonlinear Lamb waves including second harmonic and acoustic-radiation-induced quasi-static components (QSC) have a potential for accurately evaluating early-stage fatigue damage. Most previous studies focus on second-harmonic-based techniques that require phase velocity matching and are hard to isolate interferences from ultrasonic testing systems. The aforementioned requirement and deficiency limit applications of the second-harmonic-based techniques. In this study, a QSC-based technique of low-frequency Lamb waves is proposed for early-stage fatigue damage evaluation of metal plates, which does not need to require phase velocity matching and can remove interferences from ultrasonic testing systems. Both in simulations and in experiments, the primary Lamb wave mode at a low frequency that meets approximate group velocity matching with the generated QSC is selected. In finite element simulations, different levels of material nonlinearities by changing the third-order elastic constants are used to characterize levels of fatigue damage. Numerical results show that the magnitude of the generated QSC pulse increases with the levels of fatigue damage. Early-stage fatigue damage in aluminum plates with different fatigue cycles is further experimentally evaluated. The generated QSC pulse is extracted from received time-domain signals using the phase-inversion technique and low-pass digital filtering processing. The curve of the normalized relative acoustic nonlinearity parameter versus the cyclic loading number is obtained. Numerical simulations and experimental results show that the early-stage fatigue damage in aluminum plates can effectively be evaluated using the QSC generated by low-frequency Lamb waves.