The use of Lamb waves for structural health monitoring (SHM) has complicated by its multi-mode character and dispersion effect, which impacts the damage positioning and high-resolution imaging. The group velocity dispersion curves of Lamb waves can be employed to warp the frequency axis, and then to establish warped frequency transform (WFT) to process Lamb waves. In this paper, received signals are directly compensated with warped frequency transform to suppress dispersion, and a new imaging method is proposed based on warped frequency transform. The propagation of Lamb waves in damaged aluminum plate is simulated by finite element software ABAQUS, results show that warped frequency transform can effectively compensate dispersive wave-packets, and high-resolution damage imaging can be obtained by the proposed method.

Considering the influence of Lamb wave dispersion on the precision of damage detection, a new detection method of scattering source based on time-frequency curves and ellipse localization method is proposed. Empirical mode decomposition(EMD) is used to decompose the scattering signal into finite narrowband signals, and a modified continuous wavelet transform(CWT) is further used to get the time-frequency distribution(TFD) of the detected signal, and the arriving time of different frequency component is estimated based on TFD. A series of location results can be obtained from different frequency components using ellipse localization method. The damage position can finally be estimated by synthesizing localization results at different frequencies. Experiments on aluminum plate are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. EMD-CWT analysis can get precise time-frequency curves in highly dispersive low frequency band of A0 mode. The damage location results is more accurate and the influence from occasional factors can be suppressed by using the synthesized method.