Acoustoelastic analysis of reflected waves in nearly incompressible, hyper-elastic materials: forward and inverse problems

Many materials (e.g., rubber or biologic tissues) are "nearly" incompressible and often assumed to be incompressible in their constitutive equations. This assumption hinders realistic analyses of wave motion including acoustoelasticity. In this study, this constraint is relaxed and the reflected waves from nearly incompressible, hyper-elastic materials are examined. Specifically, reflection coefficients are considered from the interface of water and uni-axially prestretched rubber. Both forward and inverse problems are experimentally and analytically studied with the incident wave perpendicular to the interface. In the forward problem, the wave reflection coefficient at the interface is evaluated with strain energy functions for nearly incompressible materials in order to compute applied strain. For the general inverse problem, mathematical relations are derived that identify both uni-axial strains and normalized material constants from reflected wave data. The validity of this method of analysis is demonstrated via an experiment with stretched rubber. Results demonstrate that applied strains and normalized material coefficients can be simultaneously determined from the reflected wave data alone if they are collected at several different (but unknown) levels of strain. This study therefore indicates that acoustoelasticity, with an appropriate constitutive formulation, can determine strain and material properties in hyper-elastic, nearly incompressible materials.