Abstract: To investigate the propagation of acoustic surface waves in a cylindrical coating-substrate system,a finite element algorithm is put forward to simulate laser inducing acoustic surface wave in cylindrical coating-substrate system based on the thermoelastic mechanism.Using this algorithm,the waveforms of laser-induced acoustic waves on the aluminum(coating)/nickel(substrate) and nickel(coating)/aluminum(substrate) system are simulated.The results show that surface acoustic wave on the cylindrical coating-substrate system is dispersive.When surface acoustic waves are propagating along the cylindrical structure,there exists geometry dispersion,which makes the dispersion property of the cylindrical coating system more complex than that of a plate coating system.As a result,there is not simple rule for predicating the dispersive property of surface acoustic waves on cylindrical coating-substrate system.