Determination of the elastic constants of a composite plate using wavelet transforms and neural networks

An inverse method based on a combination of the wavelet transform and artificial neural networks is presented. The method is used to recover the elastic constants of a fiber-reinforced composite plate from experimental measurements of ultrasonic Lamb waves generated and detected with lasers. In this method, the elastic constants are not recovered from the dispersion curves but rather directly from the measured waveforms. Transient waveforms obtained by numerical simulations for different elastic constants are used as input to train the neural network. The wavelet transform is used to extract the eigenvectors from the Lamb wave signals to simplify the structure of the neutral network. The eigenvectors are then introduced into a multilayer internally recurrent neural network with a back-propagation algorithm. Finally, experimental waveforms recoded on a titanium-graphite composite plate are used as input to recover the elastic constants of the material.