This work presents an easy way to deduce the tensorial transfer and Green functions for Lamb waves generated in isotropic elastic plates. These functions could be applied to obtain the response of each propagating mode in the ensemble of excited modes arising from any sort of pulsed excitation (wedge transducers, lasers, etc.). The transfer function is based on modal analysis development. Not only is it easy to manipulate but also allows the avoidance of laborious calculations for each kind of Lamb waves source. Theoretical predictions are compared with those of Viktorov [I. A. Viktorov, Rayleigh and Lamb Waves (Plenum, New York, 1967)] and with experimental measurements of Lamb waves generated by the wedge-transducer method.

This paper develops a theoretical background for the interpretation of the time reversal ͑TR͒ processes applied to the refocalization of acoustic waves in dispersive media with multimode propagation of waves. Two parameters are introduced in order to measure the efficiency of signal recompression in TR processes: spatial and temporal efficiencies. It is demonstrated that the signal recompression enhances when the medium is highly dispersive, when there are several modes involved in the process, and when the angular aperture of the TR mirror is appreciable. These results are applied to Lamb waves recompression in thin plates and focalization efficiencies in longitudinal and transversal directions are deduced. Finally, these theoretical results are compared with the experimental ones obtained for different plate thicknesses.

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Acoustical perturbation by targets smaller than the wavelength can generate evanescent waves, which decay with the distance of propagation. By putting such targets immediately under the free surface of water, the diffracted acoustical field can excite the surface membrane before evanescence, and it produces a static ripple because of the radiation pressure. A collimated beam of light reflects at the perturbed surface, and it becomes modulated in phase. In this work we show experimental results where we achieve an optical image of the acoustical evanescent waves produced by an array-like target. Arising from the theory, we present a numerical calculus of the optical image produced by the ultrasonic field diffracted from the target in order to verify the experimental results. With this method, we look for a spatial resolution smaller than acoustical wavelength, for normal incidence and plane waves. In our experimental device, we use a sound wavelength in water greater than 1.5 mm, generated by a PZT transducer. We can resolve an array of 1.0 mm of periodicity.

We present a differential operator approach for Fourier image processing. We demonstrate that when the mask in the processor Fourier plane is an analytical function, it can be described by means of a differential operator that acts directly on the input field to give the processed output image. In many cases (e.g., Schlieren imaging) this approach simplifies the calculations, which usually involve the evaluation of convolution integrals, and gives a new insight into the image-processing procedure.