Stiffened panels have been widely utilized in fuselages and wings as critical load-bearing components. These structures are prone to be damaged under long-term and extreme loads, and their health monitoring has been a common concern. The guided wave-based monitoring method is regarded as an efficient approach to detect the damage in stiffened plates because of its wide monitoring range and high sensitivity to micro-damage. Efficient simulation of wave propagation can theoretically demonstrate the detection mechanism of the method. In this study, a Time-Domain Spectral Finite Element Method (TD-SFEM) is adopted to study the wavefield in stiffened plates, where continuous Absorbing Layers with Increasing Damping (ALID) strategy is proposed to circumvent the disturbance of reflected waves on boundaries. After the convergence analysis, the developed TD-SFEM with ALID is validated by the finite element method first. Then, wave scattering and the influence of the stiffener are investigated in detail by comparing the results with the non-stiffened structure. Finally, the effects of the parameters of the stiffener, such as the height and width, on wave propagation are studied, respectively. The results illustrate that the proposed TD-SFEM with ALID is an efficient approach to study the wave propagation in the stiffened plate and can reveal the mechanism of influence of the stiffener. It is found that the height of the stiffener changes the interference of wavefield in the plate, while the effects of the width are mainly in wave scattering and mode conversion.
