Composite materials have gained a considerable importance, being widely applied e.g. in aerospace industries as unidirectional, layered or woven structures. Through their complex build-up these materials exhibit anisotropic elastic behavior, raising considerable difficulties for ultrasonic nondestructive testing techniques. In modeling the interaction of elastic waves with such media a simple tool of assisting analysis is available. In this respect, simulation and optimization allow for a reduction of experimental work and an increase in reliability of applied testing procedures. For materials exhibiting orthotropic elastic symmetry, fundamental plane wave characteristics are presented in this contribution. These relationships are further applied for transducer-field modeling using the Generalized Point Source Synthesis method [1]. Since for complex-shaped components the materials' natural symmetry planes are in general not identical with the component's surfaces, a respective transformation has been applied recently to yield a compact elastic tensor representation for such configurations [2]. Based on this formulation, all analytical results are obtianed in a coordinate-free form, where the material's spatial orientation appears as an additional parameter. Since orthotropy includes the higher symmetries tetragonal, transversely isotropic, cubic and isotropic, the results presented cover most of the materials of today's industrial interest. Numerical results cover solwness and group velocity diagrams as well as field pattern calculations for commercial transducers including time-depedent rf-impulse modeling.
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