Assessment of accumulated damage in circular tubes using nonlinear circumferential guided wave approach: A feasibility study

•The model is presented for analyzing the effect of SHG of primary CGW propagation.•The acoustic nonlinearity parameter Δβ for CGW along one circumference is proposed.•Feasibility of using Δβ to assess accumulated damage in circular tubes is validated. The feasibility of using the nonlinear effect of primary Circumferential Guided Wave (CGW) propagation for assessing accumulated damage in circular tubes has been investigated. For a given circular tube, an appropriate mode pair of fundamental and double frequency CGWs is chosen to enable that the second harmonic of the primary wave mode can accumulate along the circumferential direction. After the given circular tube is subjected to compression-compression repeated loading for different numbers of loading cycles, the corresponding ultrasonic measurements are conducted. It is found that there is a direct correlation between the acoustic nonlinearity parameter measured with CGWs propagating through one full circumference and the level of accumulated damage in the circular tube. The experimental result obtained validates the feasibility for quantitative assessment of the accumulated damage in circular tubes using the effect of second-harmonic generation by CGW propagation.