Analysis of multiple wavelengths of Lamb waves generated by meander-line coil EMATs

Abstract

The electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) with a meander-line coil possess the capability of generating Lamb waves carrying multiple wavelengths, and the characteristics of multiple wavelengths is analyzed by developing a spatial transversal filter model for the EMAT. It is shown that the characteristics is due to the wavelength spectrum of the EMATs, which is a wavelength-domain representation of information about the wavelength components, and the magnitude of each components is modulated by an envelope which depends on the geometric pattern of the meander-line coil. The characteristics of multiple wavelengths might cause the multi-modes phenomenon, therefore a method for removing the effect of multiple wavelengths is proposed. It is shown that the effect can be removed by designing an EMAT which can produce a special envelop to suppress the harmonic wavelengths. Experiments are set up to study the characteristics of multiple wavelengths and verify the validity of the proposed method.

Keywords: Electromagnetic acoustic transducers; Lamb waves; Meander-line coil; Multiple wavelengths excitation.