Lamb waves have received a great attention in the structural health monitoring (SHM) societies because they can propagate over relatively large distances in wave guides such as thin plates and shells. The time-of-flights of Lamb waves can be used to detect damages in a wave guide. However, due to the inherent dispersive and multi-mode characteristics of Lamb waves, one must decompose the Lamb wave modes into the symmetric and anti-symmetric modes for SHM applications. Thus, this paper proposes a decomposition method for the two-mode Lamb waves based on two rules: the group velocity ratio rule and the mode amplitude ratio rule. The group velocity ratio rule means that the ratio of the group velocities of fundamental symmetric and antisymmetric modes is constant, while the mode amplitude ratio rule means that the magnitude of the fundamental symmetric modes of all measured response signals should be always larger than those of the anti-symmetric mode once the input signal is applied so that the magnitude of fundamental symmetric mode of excited Lamb-wave is larger than that of anti-symmetric mode, and vice versa. The proposed method is verified through the experiments ducted for an aluminum plate specimen.
