Imaging of disbond in adhesive joints with Lamb waves

Lamb waves are increasingly attractive for nondestructive testing of adhesively bonded structures due to their unique properties. Larger areas can be inspected using single pulse excitation compared to localized point-by-point standard bulk wave ultrasonic testing with only two modes, longitudinal or shear waves. Lamb waves offer an infinite number of guided wave modes to design wave structure and/or field distributions having specific sensitivity to certain defects, material properties and geometry of the component. The objective of this work was to study the sensitivity and efficiency of adhesive bond inspection using Lamb waves and to facilitate the interpretation through imaging.