Study of in-plane wave propagation in 2-D polycrystalline microstructure

In this paper, a numerical and experimental study on in-plane guided wave propagation in polycrystalline microstructure is presented. For numerical study, Voronoi tessellation is used to generate the microstructure considering the concept of regularity parameter. It helped in producing equiaxed grains of microstructure, which resembles the texture of natural polycrystalline structure. In-plane guided wave propagation, resulting in simultaneous P and S wave transmission in two-dimensional (2-D) microstructure is simulated using a commercial finite element (FE) package, using graphics processing unit (GPU) based computing. Experimental verification of the in-plane guided wave propagation model is performed in the Rayleigh regime. The in-house experiments are performed on Inconel-600 plate using piezoelectric wafers as transducers. Though considerable work has been reported on P-wave characterization in a polycrystalline material, the study of in-plane guided waves is limited. It is found that within Rayleigh regime, the attenuation behavior of the in-plane guided wave shows a frequency dependency that is substantially less compared to the bulk wave in the 2-D polycrystalline microstructure. The model is first validated with the existing literature, particularly for the attenuation characterization in the Rayleigh regime. For in-plane guided waves, firstly, the numerical and experimental time-domain responses showing P and S waves are presented for different excitation frequencies. Within Rayleigh regime, the experimental and numerical group velocities and attenuation are in good agreement. Next, the attenuation characteristics are studied in the frequency range corresponding to the Rayleigh regime for different grain sizes. A new attenuation coefficient is proposed that relates the attenuation of bulk and in-plane guided waves. The study of in-plane guided wave in polycrystalline material will help in the ultrasonic investigation of defects and flaws in such materials.