Cellular polypropylene polymer foam as air-coupled ultrasonic transducer materials.

Cellular polypropylene polymer foams, also known as ferroelectrets, are compelling candidates for air-coupled ultrasonic transducer materials because of their excellent acoustic impedance match to air and because they have a piezoelectric d(33) coefficient superior to that of PVDF. This study investigates the performance of ferroelectret transducers in the generation and reception of ultrasonic waves in air. As previous studies have noted, the piezoelectric coupling coefficients of these foams depend on the number, size, and distribution of charged voids in the microstructure.

Laser ultrasonics in copy paper: bending stiffness dependence on temperature and moisture content.

The A0 Lamb mode in copy paper is generated and detected by using laser ultrasonics. The frequency dependence of the group velocity of the A0 mode is found from the wavelet transform of the measured signal. A best fit of the dispersion curve against predictions based on orthotropic plate theory yields an estimate of the bending stiffness of the sample.

Micromechanical modeling of viscoelastic voided composites in the low-frequency approximation.

The self-consistent model of Cherkaoui et al. [J. Eng.

Determination of the elastic constants of a composite plate using wavelet transforms and neural networks.

An inverse method based on a combination of the wavelet transform and artificial neural networks is presented. The method is used to recover the elastic constants of a fiber-reinforced composite plate from experimental measurements of ultrasonic Lamb waves generated and detected with lasers. In this method, the elastic constants are not recovered from the dispersion curves but rather directly from the measured waveforms.