Transfer and Green functions based on modal analysis for Lamb waves generation

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. (C) 2000 Acoustica; Society of America. [S0001-4966(00)00705-0].