Modeling lamb wave propagation in visco-elastic composite plates using a fifth-order plate theory.

A new extension of the shear deformation theory to fifth order in order to calculate the spectrum of Lamb waves in orthotropic media over a wide frequency range is developed and analyzed. The aspiration of the proposed method is to create an alternative framework to exhaustive 3D elasticity based solutions by increasing computational efficiency without losing accuracy, nor robustness. A new computational framework is introduced which allows to estimate the dispersion curves for the first nine symmetric and nine anti-symmetric Lamb modes.