Relative Ability of Wedge-Coupled Piezoelectric and Meander Coil EMAT Probes to Generate Single-Mode Lamb Waves

Ultrasonic guided waves are used extensively when checking for defects in petrochemical and other industries and are mostly generated using piezoelectric transducers on an angled wedge or electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) in different configurations. Low-frequency inspection allows for long-distance propagation, but it is best suited for detecting relatively large defects, while at higher frequencies, the presence of multiple wave modes limit defect detectability, so achieving practical single Lamb mode excitation via careful transduction is very beneficial. This paper investigates the relative ability of angled piezoelectric and meander coil EMAT probes to produce single-mode transduction in the medium (~1–5 MHz-mm) and high (>5 MHz-mm) frequency-thickness regions of the dispersion curves. The nature of each transducer is studied analytically by simulating the corresponding surface forces, followed by the use of a Fourier transform in time and space (2-D fast Fourier transform) to highlight the excitation region in the wavenumber–frequency space. With angled wedge excitation there is a linear relationship between the excitation frequency and the wavenumber which means that the excitation tends to track typical dispersion curves, allowing for easier pure mode generation. In contrast, the EMAT controls frequency and wavenumber separately which makes it more difficult to generate a pure mode when dispersion curves are close together; however, by narrowing the frequency bandwidth via a large number of cycles in the excitation signal, pure mode generation via an EMAT was shown to be possible even in areas of closely spaced modes. As example cases, analytical results, backed up by experiments, showed that signals dominated by the A0 mode at 1.5 MHz-mm and also the A1 mode at 18 MHz-mm can be generated with both angled piezoelectric and EMAT probes.