Modeling of transient bending wave in an infinite plate and its coupling to arbitrary shaped piezoelements

Estimating the location and energy of impacts is of primary importance for assessing the condition of structures. Particularly, such estimation can be easily obtained from the energy flow in the structures, which is usually derived from the Poynting vector. In order to measure the Poynting vector in a thin plate using piezoelements bonded on the plate, an analytical formulation of the impulse response in thin infinite plates is presented. The knowledge of the impulse response of any linear time invariant (LTI) system is precious information for the determination of its behavior under arbitrary inputs. When dealing with propagation, and especially mechanical wave propagation, a common approach consists in using numerical methods that are often time-consuming, especially for multi-coupled systems. This paper proposes a new approach for modeling the impulse response of an infinite plate with surface-bonded piezoelectric elements. The proposed analytical formulation allows bypassing numerical analysis drawbacks, in particular instabilities occurring at high frequencies, case-dependent systems and computational requirements, while giving the response for any time and space domain values using a simple convolution. The proposed model relies on flexural wave decomposition over the spatial frequency domain and corresponds to a time generalization of the angular spectrum theory, thus introducing flexural wave propagation as a time-varying spatial filter. Once the impulse is know in the spatial frequency domain, the inverse Fourier transform is applied and leads to the impulse response in the physical domain. From this model, an analytical expression of the impulse voltage response of the piezoelectric transducers and the Poynting vector can be derived quite easily. The predicted impulse response is then compared to FEM simulation results and experimental measurements in order to assess the model. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.