The Dispersion Calculator: A Free Software for Calculating Dispersion Curves of Guided Waves

Abstract

The nondestructive inspection of components by means of guided waves is an emerging technology in fields like aerospace or pipeline construction and maintenance. The guided waves' capability of propagating many meters in a structure is utilized for swift inspection tasks as well as structural health monitoring. The German Aerospace Center uses Lamb waves for the quality assurance of large-scale aerospace vehicle components made from carbon composites. However, the use of guided waves in NDT requires knowledge of the dispersion curves. DISPERSE is the most renown software for the calculation of dispersion curves. This paper presents the open source Dispersion Calculator (DC). The MATLAB® -based DC is an interactive and fully validated software for the computation of dispersion curves and mode shapes of guided waves in isotropic plates and multilayered anisotropic composites. Damping caused by viscoelasticity and fluid-loading can be considered. DC features the capability of calculating laminates consisting of several hundreds of layers so that even the largest specimens, like rocket booster pressure vessels, can be calculated. This is made possible through the implementation of the stiffness matrix method. DC is also able to distinguish the different mode families, like symmetric, antisymmetric, and nonsymmetric Lamb, shear horizontal, and Scholte waves, depending on the symmetry and coupling properties of a given layup. Lastly, DC features a highly efficient and robust dispersion curve tracing algorithm. DC is available at GitHub, and it has gained many users world-wide since its initial release in 2018.