  Guided ultrasonic wave based structural health monitoring has been of
interest over decades. However, the influence of pre-stress states on the
propagation of Lamb waves in thin-walled structures is not fully covered, yet.
So far experimental work presented in the literature only focuses on a few
individual frequencies, which does not allow a comprehensive verification of
the numerous numerical investigations. Furthermore, most work is based on the
strain-energy density function by Murnaghan. To validate the common modeling
approach and to investigate the suitability of other non-linear strain-energy
density functions an extensive experimental and numerical investigation
covering a large frequency range is presented here. The numerical simulation
comprises the use of the Neo-Hooke as well as the Murnaghan material model. It
is found that these two material models show qualitatively similar results.
Furthermore, the comparison with the experimental results reveals, that the
Neo-Hooke material model reproduces the effect of pre-stress on the difference
in the Lamb wave phase velocity very well in most cases. For the $A_0$ wave
mode at higher frequencies, however, the sign of this difference is only
correctly predicted by the Murnaghan model. In contrast to this the Murnaghan
material model fails to predict the sign change for the $S_0$ wave mode.
