Third harmonic shear horizontal waves for material degradation monitoring

Early detection of incipient damage in structures through material degradation monitoring is a challenging and important topic. Nonlinear guided waves, through their interaction with material micro-defects, allow possible detection of structural damage at its early stage of initiations. This issue is investigated using both the second harmonic Lamb waves and the third harmonic shear horizontal waves in this article. A brief analysis first highlights the selection of the primary–secondary S0 Lamb wave mode pair and primary–tertiary SH0 mode pair from the perspective of cumulative high-order harmonic wave generation. Through a tactic design, an experiment is then conducted to compare the sensitivity of the third harmonic shear horizontal waves and the second harmonic Lamb waves to microstructural changes on the same plate subjected to a dedicated thermal heating treatment. The third harmonic shear horizontal waves are finally applied to monitor the microstructural changes and material degradation in a plate subjected to a thermal aging sequence, cross-checked by Vickers hardness tests. The experiment results demonstrate that the third harmonic shear horizontal waves indeed exhibit higher sensitivity to microstructural changes than the commonly used second harmonic Lamb waves. In addition, results demonstrate that the designed third harmonic shear horizontal wave–based system entails effective characterization of thermal aging–induced microstructural changes in metallic plates.