• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.36 no.6
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• pp.474-482
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• 2016

A Kelvin foam plate - widely used in the energy and transport industries as a lightweight structural material - was examined to estimate its Young's modulus using ultrasound. An isotropic tetrakaidecahedron foam structure was designed in SolidWorks and printed using 3D printer with an ABS plastic material. The 3D printed foam structure was used to build a foam plate with a 14 mm thickness ($50mm{\times}100mm$ in size) for the ultrasonic test. The Kelvin foam plate, a significantly porous medium, was completely filled with paraffin wax to enable the ultrasound to penetrate through the porous medium. The acoustic wave velocity of the wax-filled Kelvin foam was measured using the time of flight (TOF) method. Furthermore, the elastic modulus of the Kelvin foam was estimated based on an elastic structural model developed in this study. The Young's modulus of the produced Kelvin foam was observed to be approximately 3.4% of the bulk value of the constituent material (ABS plastic). This finding is consistent with experimental and theoretical results reported by previous studies.