Simulation of propagation characteristics of ultrasonic guided waves in fractured long bone

Using ultrasonic guided waves (GW) to assess fractures in long bones has gained considerable attention. This paper focuses on using an improved hybrid boundary element method (HBEM) to analyze and calculate reflection coefficients (RC) and transmission coefficients (TC) of low-order GWs for cracks with different depth-to-width ratios (d/w) in fractured long bones. The results showed that the primary received modes, which include the transmitted and reflected modes, are the same as the incident modes. For some values of d/w, the TC of different GW always had local maxima at adjacent frequencies. For some other cracks with different d/w, most of the TC curves had local maxima of which frequencies and values are not overlapped. These results obtained could be useful for optimizing the excitation of GWs on quantitative assessment of fractured long bones.