{
  "abstract": "Early material degradation can produce weak, local changes in elastic stiffness before a crack or void forms, but conventional ultrasonic measurements dilute these changes through path and thickness averaging. This paper introduces DEPTH (Depth-resolved Elastic Property Tomography using Higher-order modes), which uses mode-to-mode scattering among higher-order guided waves to reconstruct elastic-property variations as a function of axial position and depth through a plate. The formulation is developed using shear-horizontal (SH) modes, for which the reconstructed property is shear modulus. A Born formulation shows that each incident-received mode pair contains at most two cosine depth orders, allowing the through-thickness field to be recovered from diverse modal mixtures across mode pairs and frequency. The matrix-free regularised inverse is evaluated using direct two-dimensional modal data, practical single-surface excitation and reception, and full three-dimensional finite-element data. In a 10 mm plate, the ideal two-dimensional case gives a through-thickness point-spread FWHM of 0.84-1.03 mm, while the single-surface configuration recovers four compact targets at the correct depths. This provides the first demonstration of depth-resolved elastic-property tomography from multimode guided-wave transmission with excitation and reception confined to a single physical plate surface. With full three-dimensional propagation and finite-width transduction, the reconstruction retains the compact-target positions with a whole-image correlation of 0.899 against a matched acquisition-limited reconstruction. These simulation results demonstrate that higher-order guided-wave mode conversion can provide local depth-resolved elastic-property tomography from surface-access measurements, with potential for characterising early-stage damage such as fatigue.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2609.31455",
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Peter Huthwaite"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5pk1b1qrk5we0.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2609.31455",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "5pk1b1qrk5we0",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31455",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "physics.app-ph"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2211|Ultrasonics and Acoustic Wave Propagation"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7214584057",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2609.31455",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-25",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5pk1b1qrk5we0.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:24:52Z",
      "native_id": "2609.31455",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.31455"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "physics",
      "origin": "arxiv:physics.app-ph",
      "subfield": "applied-instrumentation"
    }
  ],
  "title": "Depth-resolved elastic property tomography using higher-order shear-horizontal modes",
  "title_text": "Depth-resolved elastic property tomography using higher-order shear-horizontal modes",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:24:52Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5pk1b1qrk5we0",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}