A noncontacting technique has been developed to measure the thickness of thin metal sheet by using a pulsed laser to generate both symmetric and antisymmetric Lamb waves. These have been detected with a laser interferometer. Analysis of the waveforms allows an estimation of the sheet thickness and accuracies to within 2% are attainable on sheets as thin as 27 μm.
Numerical inversion of the Hankel–Laplace transform has been performed for the case of ultrasonic displacements in an infinite, homogeneous, isotropic plate which is excited thermoelastically by a laser pulse. Values for the elastic moduli and the plate thickness may be extracted when the calculated displacements are compared directly to those obtained experimentally. Previous authors have demonstrated methods for determining the elastic modulus in thick plates; this letter shows that using a different method for the development of the theory allows similar modulus determinations to be made for thin as well as thick plates.
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