Progress in air-coupled ultrasound

摘要

A variety of industrial and everyday non-destructive inspection applications exist where the target material/product is inaccessible or, contact with the material is prohibited. In such cases, air-coupled ultrasonic techniques play a major role but commonly significant transmission loss is known to occur. Therefore, it becomes imperative to know the amount of absolute wave mechanical strain achieved in materials embedded in gaseous medium, for certain applications. Thus, the overall objective of this work was to establish simulated results and specific experimental verifications of the numerical modeling, and develop guidelines in the use of matching layers to maximize the wave mechanical strain imparted to materials. A Laser Doppler Vibrometer was used to obtain the displacements/strains induced in the materials. Coupled Acoustic Piezoelectric Analysis (CAPA), coupled field finite element method software was used to perform the simulations. The applications considered in this work include metallic targets inside an enclosed container, food products and also elastomeric composites such as automotive tires.