Numerical Procedures for Simulation of Wave Propagation in Plates

Abstract

Structural health monitoring (SHM) using wave propagation technique is an emerging method that can be used to detect, locate, and quantify the structural damages before catastrophic failures. Advancement of several finite-element simulation programs has helped scientists and engineers in validating the numerical solutions with the experimental results. Most of the researchers use explicit procedures for wave propagation problems. However, for electromechanical problems where piezoelectric materials are used for exciting waves, the explicit procedure is not available in most cases. Hence, implicit procedures are used to account for the piezoelectric effect. It becomes necessary to choose which procedure is apt for obtaining sufficient accuracy and to run the problem within reasonable computational time. This paper presents a comparative study of different finite-element procedures for modeling wave propagation in plates. Three different analysis procedures are studied, namely implicit analysis, explicit analysis, and implicit–explicit co-simulation analysis. The results show that the co-simulation model is more reliable and efficient compared to other models.