• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.566-576
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• 2003

Carbon-fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) composite laminates often possess strong in-plane elastic anisotropy attributable to the fiber orientation and layup sequence. The layup orientation thus greatly influences its properties in a composite laminate. It could result in the part being rejected or discarded if the layup orientation of a ply is misaligned. A nondestructive technique would be very beneficial, which could be used to test the part after curing and to require less time than the optical test. In this paper, ultrasonic scanners were set out for different measurement modalities for acquiring ultrasonic signals as a function of in-plane azimuthal angle. The motorized scanner was built first for making transmission measurements using a pair of normal-incidence shear wave transducers. Another scanner was then built fer the acousto-ultrasonic configuration using contact transducers. A ply-by-ply vector decomposition model has been developed, simplified, and implemented for composite laminates fabricated from unidirectional plies. We have compared the test results with model data. It is found that strong agreement are shown between tests and the model developed in characterizing cured layups of the laminates.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.55-63
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• 2005

A novel imaging system for High-resolution Ultrasonic Transmission Tomography (HUTT) and soft tissue differentiation methodology for the HUTT system are presented. The critical innovation of the HUTT system includes the use of sub-millimeter transducer elements for both transmitter and receiver arrays and multi-band analysis of the first-arrival pulse. The first-arrival pulse is detected and extracted from the received signal (i.e., snippet) at each azimuthal and angular location of a mechanical tomographic scanner in transmission mode. Each extracted snippet is processed to yield a multi-spectral vector of attenuation values at multiple frequency bands. These vectors form a 3-D sinogram representing a multi-spectral augmentation of the conventional 2-D sinogram. A filtered backprojection algorithm is used to reconstruct a stack of multi-spectral images for each 2-D tomographic slice that allow tissue characterization. A novel methodology for soft tissue differentiation using spectral target detection is presented. The representative 2-D and 3-D HUTT images formed at various frequency bands demonstrate the high-resolution capability of the system. It is shown that spherical objects with diameter down to 0.3㎜ can be detected. In addition, the results of soft tissue differentiation and characterization demonstrate the feasibility of quantitative soft tissue analysis for possible detection of lesions or cancerous tissue.