Abstract
The piezoelectric fiber patch (PFP) is a transducer type suitable for guided wave based structural health monitoring (SHM) due to its light, thin, and flexible characteristics. In previous work, a PFP based transducer design for selective excitation of the fundamental order of the shear horizontal wave mode (SH0) was introduced (SHPFP). In this work, improved SH0 wave PFP transducer designs are proposed: the rounding corner and the dual design. The improvement is determined by numerical simulation and the most promising dual design is experimentally realized. Measurements of the generated wavefield by Laser vibrometry confirm the simulation results. Almost pure SH0 wave can be generated by the new designs, and the dual design has a very strong directivity, which is useful for several guided wave based SHM applications.