High efficiency Lamb wave lens for subsurface imaging

A conventional scanning acoustic microscope lens excites all the possible modes of acoustic waves in the solid structure under examination. The excited leaky modes contribute significantly to the high contrast obtained in the images, but because all such modes exist simultaneously, the interpretation of the images is not straightforward. A new lens geometry that can be used with acoustic microscopes to image layered solid structures is proposed. This new lens can efficiently focus the acoustic waves in only one of the Lamb wave modes of the layered solid. The images obtained are easy to interpret, and the subsurface sensitivity is high.