Guided waves propagation in arbitrarily stacked composite laminates: Between-layers incompatibility issue resolution using hybrid matrix strategy

Abstract

Lamb waves (LWs) are widely used to achieve structural health monitoring of aeronautic composite structures. Composite materials are however anisotropic and LWs propagation characteristics depend on their propagation direction. Within one composite ply, when this direction coincides with the principal axis of the ply, they are not coupled with shear waves (SHWs) but become coupled with SHWs for any other direction. As composite materials are built up with layers at various orientations LWs and SHWs are coupled for some layers and uncoupled for some others when studying an arbitrary propagation direction. Transfer Matrix Method (TMM), Global Matrix Method (GMM), and Stiffness Matrix Method (SMM) are all methods allowing to predict guided waves (LWs and SHWs) behavior in composite materials. However those methods suffer from an incompatibility issue preventing them to manage cases when SHWs and LWs are coupled for some plies but uncoupled for some other plies. This issue is particularly frequent when dealing with metallic-composite plates or with composite plates made up with isotropic, orthotropic, and triclinic materials. In order to solve this incompatibility issue, a hybrid matrix strategy (HMS) is proposed here on the basis of SMM. The core idea of the HMS is to re-couple LWs and SHWs into hybrid guided waves when they are uncoupled in order to make them compatible with the general coupled waves cases. The numerical stability of HMS is proved theoretically and its effectiveness is validated through numerical investigations and using experimental data from the literature. The SMM-HMS framework can thus be considered as a state of the art benchmark approach for evaluating the performance of numerical methods dedicated to the computation of guided waves dispersion curves and can be confidently applied to any arbitrary composite material used in aeronautic and aerospace industries.