Wideband Lamb wave analysis based on continuous wavelet transform

In Lamb wave detection of damages in smart structures, the excitation pulse is usually designed as a narrow band burst wave for the convenience of analysis and recognition. However, the wideband excitation can excite more modes in plate/shell structure and thus provides extra information for changes of the structure. This paper presents a method that can extract information in wideband Lamb wave signals. By transforming the detected signals into various sub-frequency band, the measured signal can be converted to its equivalences of narrow band excitations, therefore, the information in different frequency bands can be acquired from a single test and in the same time the complicity of wideband signal can be simplified. Some test results are provided to verify this method.