A radar transducer for unidirectionally emitting and steering SH guided wave

It is of practical importance to emit a pure wave mode, focus its energy along a given direction, and then steer the wave beam in guide-wave-based structural health monitoring (SHM) because it can quickly scan the overall structure. Such a goal is usually realized using a two-dimensional (2D) phased array, which requires many transducer elements and expensive electronics. This work proposed a radar transducer (RD-T) for unidirectionally emitting and steering the fundamental shear horizontal wave (SH₀ wave). The proposed RD-T consists of an annular metasubstrate and several rectangular thickness-shear (d₁₅) piezoelectric wafers. The metasubstrate is designed to provide the required phase gradient for unidirectionally emitting and sensing a pure SH₀ wave, so no extra time delay is required for driving the RD-T. The beam steering is obtained by activating the subunits one by one. The SH₀ wavefields generated by the subunit are described by a theoretical model and the effects of dimension parameters are analyzed. Finite element simulations and experiments are conducted to examine the performances of the RD-T. Both simulated and experimental results indicate that from 200 kHz to 270 kHz, the RD-T can unidirectionally emit an SH₀ wave with a high SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) and steer the wave beam along different directions. The performance of the RD-T on damage detection is then investigated by pulse-echo experiments. It can be found that the RD-T can successfully distinguish symmetric defects and locate defects with an acceptable error. Compared with the traditional 2D phased array, the RD-T can realize 360° scanning of the overall structure more efficiently, exhibiting great potential in the field of SHM.