Experimental Investigation of Second-Harmonic Lamb Wave Generation in Additively Manufactured Aluminum

Abstract

The correlation between the nonlinear acousto-ultrasonic response and the progressive accumulation of fatigue damage is investigated for an additively manufactured aluminum alloy AlSi7Mg and compared with the behavior of a conventional wrought aluminum alloy 6060-T5. A dual transducer and wedge setup is employed to excite a 30-cycle Hann-windowed tone burst at a center frequency of 500 kHz in plate-like specimens that are 7.2 mm thick. This choice of frequency-thickness is designed to excite the symmetric Lamb mode s1, which, in turn, generates a second-harmonic s2 mode in the presence of distributed material nonlinearity. This s1-s2 mode pair satisfies the conditions for internal resonance, thereby leading to a cumulative build-up of amplitude for the second-harmonic s2 mode with increasing propagation distance. Measurements of a nonlinearity parameter β derived from the second-harmonic amplitude are plotted against propagation distance at various fractions of fatigue life under constant amplitude loading, for three different stress levels corresponding to low-cycle fatigue (LCF), high-cycle fatigue (HCF), and an intermediate case. The results show both qualitative and quantitative differences between LCF and HCF, and between the additively manufactured specimens and the wrought alloy. The potential use of this nonlinearity parameter for monitoring the early stages of fatigue damage accumulation, and hence for predicting the residual fatigue life, is discussed, as well as the potential for quality control of the additive manufacturing (AM) process.