Quantitative acoustic emission and failure mechanics of composite materials

This Paper considers quantitative acoustic emission (AE) techniques with real and simulated sources as powerful tools for investigating failure processes in composite materials. Using a simulated source acting as a point source and one or more point receivers whose characteristics are known, one has the necessary components of a materials and structure testing system. Examples are shown in which a composite material's attenuation and wavespeeds can be determined as a function of frequency and propagation direction. It is demonstrated that this testing procedure permits the ultrasonic characterization of ultra-attenuative and irregular shaped, high performance composite materials. The principles of quantitative AE source characterization procedures are also reviewed and applications are demonstrated in which the time characteristics of several simple sources are recovered.     

Non-destructive evaluation of composite materials with ultrasonic waves generated and detected by lasers

Measurement of the stiffness properties of composite materials with laser generated and detected ultrasound requires proper understanding of waves emanating from a line or point source in anisotropic and viscoelastic media. The paper briefly presents calculation results of waves radiated by such a source through or at the surface of a composite plate. Dispersion is represented as well as the multiple wave arrivals connected with the folded shape of the quasi-shear ray surface. Moreover, internal diffraction at the cusp edges is properly depicted. An identification method with specific signal processing have been used to measure the stiffness coefficients of composite materials. From group velocity data, the stiffness tensor of materials showing an orthorhombic symmetry can be identified. The stiffness tensor changes induced by elevated temperatures in a composite material were then measured. An alternative approach was developed which allows to measure the phase velocities of waves generated with laser line sources. The material characterisation reliability is then improved. Moreover, the method can be used in practical cases where the front side of the structure only is accessible with the experimental devices. Despite reflection at the rear interface of transient divergent waves which ray surfaces may contain caustics, this inverse problem can be solved in a simple and efficient manner.     

Numerical analysis of bulk conical waves in anisotropic cylinders; application to stiffness tensor measurement

A point source-point receiver technique, based on laser generation and laser detection of acoustic waves, allows determination of mechanical properties of an anisotropic cylinder. The nature of the material and the geometry of the sample give a dispersive behaviour to the diffracted waves and make the acoustic signature difficult to interpret. To overpass the intricacies, wave fronts (conical waves in the volume and helical waves on the surface) are synthesized from signals provided by scanning the primitive line of the cylinder with a laser point source. In order to distinguish between direct bulk conical waves and other contributions in the acoustic response, some considerations on line surface waves and on reflected bulk conical waves are supplied. The identification of the stiffness tensor components, based on the inversion of the bulk waves phase velocities, is applied to signals simulated for a composite material.     

A spiral wave front beacon for underwater navigation: basic concept and modeling

A spiral wave front source produces an acoustic field that has a phase that is proportional to the azimuthal angle about the source. The concept of a spiral wave front beacon is developed by combining this source with a reference source that has a phase that is constant with the angle. The phase difference between these sources contains information about the receiver's azimuthal angle relative to the beacon and can be used for underwater navigation. To produce the spiral wave front, two sources are considered: a "physical-spiral" source, which produces the appropriate phase by physically deforming the active element of the source into a spiral, and a "phased-spiral" source, which uses an array of active elements, each driven with the appropriate phase, to produce the spiral wave front. Using finite element techniques, the fields produced by these sources are examined in the context of the spiral wave front beacon, and the advantages of each source are discussed.     

The complex equivalent source method for sound propagation over an impedance plane

The sound field caused by a monopole source above an impedance plane can be calculated by using a superposition of equivalent point sources located along a line in the mirror space below the plane. Originally, such an approach for representing the half-space Green's function was described by Sommerfeld at the beginning of the last century, in order to treat half-space problems of heat conduction. However, the representation converges only for masslike impedances and cannot be used for the more important case of reflecting planes with springlike surface impedances. The singular part of the line integral can be transformed into a Hankel function, which shows that surface waves are contained in the whole solution. Unfortunately, this representation suffers from the lack of validity at certain receiver points and from restrictions on wave number and impedance range to ensure the necessary convergence. The main idea of the present method is to use also a superposition of equivalent point sources, but to allow that these sources can be located at complex source points. The corresponding form of the half-space Green's function is suitable for both masslike and springlike surface impedances, and can be used as a cornerstone for a boundary element method.     

Sensitivity analysis of an inverse procedure for determination of elastic coefficients for strong anisotropy

The elastic coefficients of anisotropic solids are often evaluated from measurements of phase or group velocities of ultrasonic bulk waves by the usage of inverse optimizing procedures. This paper discusses the effects of various factors on such procedures results for transversely isotropic solids with considerably strong anisotropy. First, the inverse determination of all elastic coefficients of unidirectional CFRP composite is briefly outlined. Then the results of the optimization are treated as exact values and the sensitivity of the optimizing process versus main considered sources of inaccuracies is analyzed. Results of extensive simulations are presented to illustrate the effect of input data distortion, input data incompleteness, and geometrical conversion from experimentally obtained group velocities into corresponding phase velocities used as input data for the optimizing procedure. The paper takes note of how information about the elastic coefficients can be extracted from the different segments of the phase velocity surface. The stability versus input data distortion for inversion from group velocities and phase velocities is compared and the importance of reliable geometrical converting from group into phase velocities is illustrated. An novel method for geometrical conversion of distorted group velocity data into corresponding phase velocities based on affine combinations of low-order polynomials is presented and compared with piecewise or high-order polynomial fitting.     

A Streak Camera System for Time Resolved Fluorimetry

Presently, there are several techniques for measurement of fluorescence lifetimes of organic molecules. These techniques, reviewed by Ware,¹ can be divided into two basic groups, those based upon pulsed sources and those based on modulated sources and phase shift measurement. In the pulsed methods, repetitive, short pulse width, intense excitation pulses excite the fluorophor and the fluorescence decay is measured; the source temporal response must be deconvoluced from the fluorescence decay in order to evaluate the fluorescence signal and lifetime. Typical sources of excitation include nanosecond flashlamps and more recently nanosecond N₂-laser (with or without a dye laser) and mode-locked lasers with picosecond pulse widths^2-6. The modulated source phase shift methods,¹ involve sinusoidal excitation of the fluorophor and measurement of the phase shift between the modulated excitation source and the modulated flourescence. Because modulation frequencies are limited to approximately 20 MHz, fluorescence lifetimes are limited to ～.1 ns and above. In addition, in the phase shift methods, only “one point” lifetimes are obtained, i.e., the entire fluorescence decay curve is not obtained.     

Rotating beamforming – motion-compensation in the frequency domain and application of high-resolution beamforming algorithms

A method is presented for the location of rotating sound sources by a microphone array. In contrast to other methods which are formulated in the time domain, this method works completely in the frequency domain and allows the application of advanced, high resolution beamforming techniques. Following the work by Lowis and Joseph for ducted sources, it is shown that a generalized cross-spectral matrix in the rotating frame of reference can be calculated which can serve as a starting point for advanced beamforming techniques. The Green's function of a moving point source under free space conditions is expressed in spherical coordinates, which are, for numerical reasons, more convenient than cylindrical coordinates. The microphones on the array have to be arranged in a ring. As a practical example high resolution beamforming deconvolution methods are applied to simulated data and measured data from rotating sources.     

Negative refraction and subwavelength imaging of a photonic-crystal slab for the frequencies in the third band

Negative refraction and subwavelength imaging properties of a two-dimensional （2D） photonic crystal （PC） slab are studied by the finite-difference time-domain method. The PC consists of a triangular lattice of air holes immersed in a dielectric. For a certain frequency range in the third photonic band, the directions of the group velocities and the phase velocities can be opposite, so the PC can work as a kind of negative refractive-index material. The light radiated from a point source can form a subwavelength image spot through the PC slab. Negative refraction and an effective refractive index of the PC slab n = -1 can be achieved for the incident wave with its incident angle within a certain range.     

The determination of material parameters of microcomponents using digital holography

Progresses in microsystem technology promise a lot of new applications in industry and research. However, the increased complexity of the microsystems demand sensitive and robust measurement techniques. Fullfield and non invasive methods are desirable to get access to spatially resolved material properties and parameters.This contribution describes a simple and fast interferometric method for the analysis of shape and deformation of small objects by optical means. These quantities together with a well defined loading of the components can be the starting point for the determination of material parameters like Poisson-ratio, Young's modulus or the thermal expansion coefficient. Holographic interferometry and multiple wavelength contouring as well as multiple source point contouring are precise enough to fulfill the requests for precision and resolution in microsystem technology even on complex shaped structures with steps or gapsA new adaptive, iterative algorithm is developed and applied to the measured results that allows the numerical evaluation of the phase data to get absolute shape and deformation information in Cartesian coordinates. Surfaces with holes, gaps and steps can be registered without any ambiguities. Digital holography as the underlying holographic recording mechanism is extremely suitable for small objects and lead to simple and compact setups in which the objects’ shape as well as their deformation behavior can be recorded. Experiments using silicon microbeams and an object from fine mechanics are described to show the great potential of these fast and robust measurement techniques with respect to the determination of material parameters.     

Effects of acoustic source and filtering on time-of-flight measurements

Time-of-flight (TOF) measurements are valuable in the estimation of distances, displacements and velocities of moving objects, phase differences of wave pulses, temperature of the atmosphere, and so on. The effects of sound source on time-of-flight measurements have been investigated in this paper. The sound sources considered are: electric horn, impact noise source, aerodynamic noise from a free jet, and the Hartmann whistle. The focus of the present study is to highlight the advantage of using Hartmann whistle for TOF measurements as this device is simple and attractive, without any moving parts. Time-of-flight of sound waves is calculated by cross-correlating the signals received by two microphones. Further, the effect of signal filtering on TOF measurements is demonstrated. The results indicate that the sound source has considerable effect on TOF measurements, and the accuracy can be significantly enhanced by appropriate signal conditioning. Hartmann whistle proves to be a good candidate as an acoustic source for TOF measurement.     

Dissipative processes during the nonequilibrium phase transformations in martensitic thermoelastic alloys

Martensitic thermoelastic transformations are considered under nonequilibrium conditions, where a system nonmonotonically tends toward a stationary process. The specific features of a phase transformation are experimentally studied on molecular models under these nonequilibrium conditions. A resonance mode of the phase transformation, which can increase the process rate by an order of magnitude without increasing the heat source temperature, is found. The dissipative processes that occur under the monotonic and resonance conditions of martensitic thermoelastic transformations are estimated. The resonance mode is shown to be accompanied by negative entropy production and to demonstrate the self-organization of the system. These results can be used to design materials and techniques for the processing of low-potential heat sources.     

Phase-shifting Zernike phase contrast microscopy for quantitative phase measurement

Zernike phase contrast microscopy is extended and combined with a phase-shifting mechanism to perform quantitative phase measurements of microscopic objects. Dozens of discrete point light sources on a ring are constructed for illumination. For each point light source, three different levels of point-like phase steps are designed, which are alternatively located along a ring on a silica plate to perform phase retardation on the undiffracted (dc) component of the object waves. These three levels of the phase steps are respectively selected by rotating the silica plate. Thus, quantitative evaluation of phase specimens can be performed via phase-shifting mechanism. The proposed method has low "halo" and "shade-off" effects, low coherent noise level, and high lateral resolution due to the improved illumination scheme.     

Prediction of Outdoor Noise Propagation Induced By Single-Phase Power Transformers

Outdoor power transformers are one of the most pervasive noise sources in power transmission and distribution systems. Accurate prediction of outdoor noise propagation plays a dominant role for the evaluation and control of noise relevant to the transformer stations. In this paper surface vibration tests are carried out on a scale model of a single-phase transformer tank wall at different excitation frequencies. The phase and amplitude of test data are found to be randomly distributed when the excitation frequency exceeds the seventh mode frequency, which allows the single-phase power transformer to be simplified as incoherent point sources. An outdoor-coherent model is subsequently developed and incorporated with the image source method to investigate noise propagation from single-phase power transformers, due to the occurrence of multiple reflections and diffractions in the propagation path of each point source. The proposed model is used to calculate the sound field of the power transformer group by exploiting the additional phase information. In comparison with the ISO9613 model and the boundary element method, it is found that the proposed coherent image source method leads to more accurate prediction results, and hence better performance for the prediction of the outdoor noise induced by single-phase power transformers.     

Line source and site characterizations for defining the sound transmission loss of building facades

An analytical model is presented for defining the sound transmission loss of building facades exposed to noise from line sources. The model describes the non-diffuse sound field incident upon the facade in terms of both source and site parameters. The effects of facade orientation relative to the line source and the sound propagation with distance are introduced as a single term in the definition of the facade sound transmission loss. This term defines a mean angle of incidence for the exterior sound field that is equivalent to a point source location relative to a point on the facade. Numerical results are presented illustrating the magnitudes of these effects and it is shown that alternative methods for conducting field measurements of building facade sound transmission loss may be related by using this model.     

相控圆弧阵声源在TI地层井孔中产生的声场

研究了相控圆弧阵声源在各向异性地层井孔中产生的声场的特征,重点分析了该声源对于地层横波各向异性的方位敏感性,旨在探索一种新的地层声学各向异性测量方法。结果显示:相控圆弧阵声源在地层中可激发多种方位阶数的声场,主要成分为单极子波场和偶极子波场;在HTI地层竖直井中,方位角不同的圆弧阵声源激发的波动的速度不同,相控圆弧阵声源对于地层横波速度的方位各向异性的敏感性主要是它所激发的弯曲波的贡献。相比于传统的正交偶极子声波测井而言,采用相控圆弧阵声源可以评价井附近地层的周向非均质性,可以提高井周测量覆盖次数,提高反演结果的可靠性。另外,相控圆弧阵声源兼具备多极子声源的功能,优化的相位控制方式可以实现方位各向异性的最佳测量。      

Incorporating source directionality into outdoor sound propagation calculations

Many outdoor sound sources, such as aircraft or ground vehicles, exhibit directional radiation patterns. However, long-range sound propagation algorithms are usually formulated for omnidirectional point sources. This paper describes two methods for incorporating directional sources into long-range sound propagation algorithms. The first is the equivalent source method (ESM), which determines a compact distribution of omnidirectional point sources reproducing a given directivity pattern in the far field. This method can be used with any propagation algorithm because it explicitly reconstructs a source function as a set of point sources with certain amplitudes and positions. The second is a directional starter method (DSM), which is developed specifically for the parabolic equation (PE) algorithms. This method derives narrow- or wide-angle directional starter fields, corresponding to a given source directivity pattern, without reconstructing the equivalent source distribution. Although the ESM can also be used for the PE, the DSM is simpler and can be more convenient, especially if the sound propagation is calculated only for one or a few azimuthal directions. While these two methods are found to produce generally distinct starter fields, they nonetheless yield identical directivity patterns.     

Prony's method applied to estimate noise source locations and their sound powers

An application of Prony's method for evaluating the acoustic power and location of sound sources from spatially sampled data is described. A sound source considered as a point source has an intensity proportional to the inverse square of the distance between source and observation point. The Fourier transform of this intensity function is an exponential function with a real exponent. The shift property of the Fourier transform results in a spectral change in the phase angle, which is expressed in the transform domain by a multiplicative exponential function of pure imaginary exponent. In this paper the usual time axis of the Fourier pair of time and frequency is treated as a variable denoting the location of the sound source. Accordingly, each spectral component of spatially sampled sound intensity generated by n point sources can be expressed as a linear combination of n complex exponentials. By applying Prony's method to the spectral data, these unknown exponents can be calculated numerically. This paper deals with an estimation procedure to find the location and power of a noise source. The estimation is done by minimizing the sum of the squares of the errors between the model and measured data. The proposed method has general applicability to problems where the so-called inverse square law for intensity can be assumed to be valid.     

Continuity and momentum equations for moist atmospheres

The moist atmosphere with occurring precipitation is considered to be a multiphase fluid composed of dry air, water vapor and hydrometeors. These compositions move with different velocities: they take a macroscopic motion with a reference velocity and a relative motion with a velocity deviated from the reference velocity. The reference velocity can be chosen as the velocities of dry air, a gas mixture and the total air mixture. The budget equations of continuity and momentum are formulated in the three reference-velocity frames. It is shown that the resulting equations are dependent on the chosen reference velocity. The diffusive flux due to compositions moving with velocities deviated from the reference velocity and the internal sources due to the phase transitions of water substances result in additional source terms in continuity and momentum equations. A continuity equation of the total mass is conserved and free of diffusive flux divergence if the reference velocity is referred to the velocity of the total air mixture. However, continuity equations in the dry-air and gasmixture frames are not conserved due to the mass diffusive flux divergence. The diffusive flux introduces additional source terms in the momentum equation. In the dry-air frame, the diffusive flux of water substances and the phase transitions of water substances contribute to the change of the total momentum. The additional sources of total momentum in the frame of a gas mixture are associated with the diffusive flux of hydrometeors, the phase transitions of hydrometeors and the gasmixture diffusive flux. In the frame of total air mixture, the contribution to the total momentum comes from the diffusive flux of all atmospheric compositions instead of the phase transitions. The continuity and momentum equations derived here are more complicated than the traditional model equations. With increasing computing power, it becomes possible to simulate atmospheric processes with these sophisticated equations. It is helpful to the improvement of precipitation forecast.     

Excitation mechanisms and dispersion characteristics of guided waves in multilayered cylindrical solid media

This paper first reviews a method of simulating the propagation characteristics of guided waves in multilayered coaxial cylindrical elastic solid media. Secondly, this method is used to investigate the properties of the guided waves for the ultrasonic long-range non-destructive evaluation techniques for rockbolts. To do so, the special case of non-leaky guided modes in open waveguides is considered. The method explains how the complex dispersion function is converted into a real function: hence the bisection technique can be employed to search for all the real roots. The model is used to (i) characterize the low dispersion range and anomalous dispersion of normal and Stoneley modes and (ii) analyze the excitation mechanisms of guided waves from axisymmetric and non-axisymmetric acoustic sources. The results are used to select suitable excitation frequency ranges associated with dominant modes with large amplitudes, low dispersion, and distinguishable propagation velocities to reduce signal distortion. The results suggest the lowest order flexural mode, excited by a radial force source, has potential to be used in practice. Also, the highly dispersive Stoneley mode propagating along a cylindrical interface is defined and distinguished from the normal mode using two properties, velocity high-frequency asymptotes and amplitude distributions along the radial direction.