Leaky guided waves in generic bars: numerical prediction and experimental validation by means of ultrasonic underwater testing

Guided Ultrasonic Waves (GUWs) are used in several industrial and civil applications for the non-destructive tests and inspection of mechanical waveguides immersed in fluids. As well known, the impedance mismatch at the fluid-structure interface causes the bulk waves traveling inside the waveguide to be partially refracted in the surrounding fluid. The leakage of bulk waves involves continuous energy radiation along the propagation direction, resulting in high attenuation rates and, consequently, reduced inspection ranges. In this work, the dispersion behaviour of leaky guided waves that propagate in immersed waveguides of general cross-section is investigated. To this end, a Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) method coupled with a 2.5D Boundary Element method (BEM) is used to extract the wave dispersion equation. The proposed formulation avoids the well known limitations of analytical methods in treating complex geometries as well as those of Finite Element-based methods in representing propagation processes in unbounded domains. Numerical and experimental results are presented, in which the dispersion curves are extracted for different bars of arbitrary shape immersed in water. The results obtained in this paper can be useful for the design of testing conditions in practical applications and to tune experimental set up.