Experimental verification and validation of nonlocal peridynamic approach for simulating guided Lamb wave propagation and damage interaction

In this article, experimental verification and validation of a peridynamics-based simulation technique, called peri-elastodynamics, are presented while simulating the guided Lamb wave propagation and wave–damage interaction for ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring applications. Peri-elastodynamics is a recently developed elastodynamic computation tool where material particles are assumed to interact with the neighboring particles nonlocally, distributed within an influence zone. First, in this article, peri-elastodynamics was used to simulate the Lamb wave modes and their interactions with the damages in a three-dimensional plate-like structure, while the accuracy and the efficacy of the method were verified using the finite element simulation method (FEM). Next, the peri-elastodynamics results were validated with the experimental results, which showed that the newly developed method is more accurate and computationally cheaper than the FEM to be used for computational nondestructive evaluation and structural health monitoring. Specifically, in this work, peri-elastodynamics was used to accurately simulate the in-plane and out-of-plane symmetric and anti-symmetric guided Lamb wave modes in a pristine plate and was extended to investigate the wave–damage interaction with damage (e.g. a crack) in the plate. Experiments were designed keeping all the simulation parameters consistent. The accuracy of the proposed technique is confirmed by performing error analysis on symmetric and anti-symmetric Lamb wave modes compared to the experimental results for pristine and damaged plates.