A novel time–frequency transform for broadband Lamb waves dispersion characteristics analysis

Owing to carrying rich information about structure flaws, broadband Lamb waves are considered as a promising tool for non-destructive testing. However, since every Lamb wave mode has its own dispersion characteristics, the feature extraction among broadband multimodal Lamb wave is challenging. Time–frequency representation is significantly effective to analyze dispersive signals. In this article, taking advantages of the idea of dispersion compensation, two kinds of time–frequency domain dispersion analysis methods for broadband Lamb wave were proposed. The first one is based on the concept of the general parameterized time–frequency transform. A kernel function related to group delay was designed and the time–frequency compensation transform was proposed. The other one combines the segment linear mapping technique and the short-frequency Fourier transform, called the time–frequency de-dispersion transform. Both these two methods work well in representing multimodal Lamb wave signals with high resolution. However, time–frequency de-dispersion transform outperforms in representing multipath Lamb waves than time–frequency compensation transform. Moreover, a mode purification strategy was also proposed for distinguishing the interested mode from interferences. According to verification in synthetic and experimental data, not only the multimodal components but also multipath echoes are represented in time–frequency plane with high resolution. Finally, the proposed method shows a great robustness to inaccuracies in the dispersion data.