• Geophysics and Geophysical Exploration
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.210-224
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• 2019

Surface wave (SW) surveys, which have been applied to numerous application fields ranging from micro-scale ultrasonic analysis to geological scale analysis, are widely used to monitor near-surface stability. The survey method is basically made through analysis on dispersion of SW propagating along the earth surface, in order to delineate shear velocity structure of subsurface. SW survey data are inverted with assuming one-dimensional (1D) layered-earth in order to recover shear wave velocities of each layer, after being analyzed to make the dispersion curve that shows phase velocity of SW with respect to frequency. This study reviews surface wave surveys with explaining the basic theory including the characteristics of dispersion and the procedure of general data processing. Even though surface wave surveys can be categorized into active and passive methods, this paper focuses only on active surface wave methods which includes continuous SW (CSW), spectral analysis of SW (SASW) and multichannel analysis of SW (MASW). Passive method will be reviewed in the subsequent paper.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.291-304
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• 2008

Piezoelectric materials have been widely used in ultrasonic nondestructive testing (NDT). PZT ceramics can be used to receive and generate surface acoustic waves. It is a common application to attach PZT transducers to the surface of structures for detecting cracks in nondestructive testing. However, not until recently have piezoelectric polymers attracted more and more attention to be the material for interdigitated (IDT) surface and guided-wave transducers. In this paper, an interdigitated gold-on-polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) transducer for actuating and sensing Lamb waves has been introduced. A specific etching technology is employed for making the surface electrodes into a certain finger pattern, the spacings of which yield different single mode responses of Lamb waves. Experiments have been performed on steel and carbon fiber composite plates. Results from PVDF IDT sensors have been compared with those from PZT transducers for verification.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.170-178
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• 1988

An automated ultrasonic flaw detection system was developed for thin-walled and short tubes such as Zircaloy-4 tubes used for cladding heavy-water reactor fuel. The system was based on the two channels immersion pulse-echo technique using 14 MHz shear wave and the specially developed helical scanning technique, in which the tube to be tested is only rotated and the small water tank with spherical focus ultrasonic transducers is translated along the tube length. The optimum angle of incidence of ultrasonic beam was 26 degrees, at which the inside and outside surface defects with the same size and direction could be detected with the same sensitivity. The maximum permissible defects in the Zircaloy-4 tubes, i.e., the longitudinal and circumferential v notches with the length of 0.76mm and 0.38mm, respectively and the depth of 0.04 mm on the inside and outside surface, could be easily detected by the system with the inspection speed of about 1 m/min and the very excellent reproducibility. The ratio of signal to noise was greater than 20 dB for the longitudinal defects and 12 dB for the circumferential defects.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.117-118
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• 1986

It is well known that nonlinear propagation characteristics of the wave in the tissue may give very useful information for the medical diagnoisis. In this paper, a new method to detect nonlinear propagation characteristics of the internal vibration in the tissue for the low frequency mechanical vibration by using bispectral analysis is proposed. In the method, low frequency vibration of f0( = 100Hz) is applied on the surface of the object, and the waveform of the internal vibration x (t) is measured from Doppler frequency modulation of silmultaneously transmitted probing ultrasonic waves. Then, the bispectra of the signal x (t) at the frequencies (f0, f0) and (f0, 2f0) are calculated to estimate the nonlinear propagation characteristics as their magnitude ratio, w here since bispectrum is free from the gaussian additive noise we can get the value with high S/N. Basic experimental system is constructed by using 3.0 MHz probing ultrasonic waves and the several experiments are carried out for some phantoms. Results show the superiority of the proposed method to the conventional method using power spectrum and also its usefulness for the tissue characterization.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.264-269
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• 2013

Since MFC(macro-fiber composite) transducer has been developed, many researchers have tried to apply this transducer on SHM(structural health monitoring), because it is so flexible and durable that it can be easily embedded to various kinds of structures. The objective of this paper is to figure out the benefits and feasibility of applying MFC transducers to guided wave technique. For this, we have experimentally tested the performance of MFC patches as transmitter and sensors for excitation and reception of guided waves on the thin aluminum alloy plate. In order to enhance the signal accuracy, we applied the FIR filter for noise reduction as well as used STFT(short-time Fourier transform) algorithm to image the guided wave characteristics clearly. From the results, the guided wave generated based on MFC showed good agreement with its theoretical dispersion curves. Moreover, the ultrasonic Lamb wave techniques based on MFC patches in pitch-catch manner was tested for detection of surface notch defects of which depths are 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% of the aluminum plate thickness. Results showed that the notch was detectable well when the notch depth was 10% of the thickness or greater.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.5 no.4
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• pp.215-225
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• 2001

Stress waves monitored on the surface of structures under various loading conditions can provide useful information on the structural health status. In this paper, stress waves are measured by several sensors when a steel beam is impacted by a ball drop. The sensors used include the piezo-electric film Sensor, the electrical strain gage, and the ultrasonic transducer, and special attention is given to the pieza film sensor. The wavelet transform is used for the time-frequency analysis of dispersive waves propagating in the beam. The velocities of the wave produced in the team due to the lateral impact is found to be frequency-dependent and identified as the flexural wave velocity based on the comparisons with the Timoshenko beam theory. A linear impact site identification method is developed using the flexural wave, and the impact sites of the beam can be accurately estimated by the piezo film sensors. It is found that the piezo film sensor is appropriate for sensing stress waves due to impact and for locating impact sites in the beam.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.34 no.3
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• pp.211-219
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• 2014

Closed cracks are difficult to detect using conventional ultrasonic testing because most incident ultrasound passes completely through these cracks. Nonlinear ultrasound inspection using sub-harmonic frequencies a promising method for detecting closed cracks. To implement this method, a sub-harmonic phased array (PA) is proposed to visualize the length of closed cracks in solids. A sub-harmonic PA generally consists of a single transmitter and an array receiver, which detects sub-harmonic waves generated from closed cracks. The PA images are obtained using the total focusing method (TFM), which (with a transmitter and receiving array) employs a full matrix in the observation region to achieve fine image resolution. In particular, the receiving signals are measured using a laser Doppler vibrometer (LDV) to collect PA images for both fundamental and sub-harmonic frequencies. Oblique incidence, which is used to boost sub-harmonic generation, inevitably produces various surface waves that contaminate the signals measured in the receiving transducer. Surface wave interference often degrades PA images severely, and it becomes difficult to read the closed crack's position from the images. Various methods to prevent or eliminate this interference are possible. In particular, enhancing images with signal processing could be a highly cost-effective method. Because periodic patterns distributed in a PA image are the most frequent interference induced by surface waves, spatial frequency filtering is applicable for removing these waves. Experiments clearly demonstrate that the spatial frequency filter improves PA images.

• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.42-48
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• 2011

The present study makes three original contributions to nanoskinned Ti-6Al-4V materials. The nanoskins were fabricated on Ti-6Al-4V material using various surface treatments: deep rolling (DR), laser shot peening (LSP), and ultrasonic nanocrystal surface modification (UNSM). These surface treatments are newly developed techniques and are becoming more popular in industrial fields. A fatigue strength comparison at up to 106 cycles was conducted on these nanoskinned Ti-6Al-4V materials. Fatigue tests were carried out using MTS under axial loading tension-compression fatigue (R = -1, RT, 5 Hz, sinusoidal wave). The analysis of the crack initiation patterns in the nanoskinned Ti-6Al-4V materials found an interior originating crack pattern and surface originating crack type. Microscopic observation was mainly used to investigate the fatigue fractured sites. These surface modification techniques have been widely adopted, primarily because of the robust grade of their mechanical properties. These are mainly the result of the formation of a large-scale, deep, and useful compressive residual stress, the formation of nanocrystals by the severe plastic deformation (SPD) at the subsurface layer, and the increase in surface hardness.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.20 no.5
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• pp.397-401
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• 2000

The corrosion-fatigue characteristics of the 12Cr steel, which is widely used in fossil power plants as a turbine blade material, are evaluated nondestructively by use of the Rayleigh surface wave. In this study, the frequency dependency of the Rayleigh surface wave is investigated indirectly by measuring the angular dependency of the backward radiation of the incident ultrasonic wave in the aged specimens, and then compared to the corrosion-fatigue characteristics. The width of the backward radiation profile decreases as the increase of the aging temperature, which seems to result from the increase of the effective degrading layer thickness. This parameter also shows an inversely proportionality to the exponent, m, in the Paris law which predicts the crack size increasement due to fatigue. The result observed in this study demonstrates high potential of the backward radiated ultrasound as a tool for the nondestructive evaluation of the corrosion-fatigue characteristics of the aged materials.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.268-273
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• 2004

A method of reflection-transmission type ultrasonic inverse scattering image was presented using linearly arrayed transducers in inner surface of half-cylinder. In this method, to reduce the number of data, the mirror effect using a reflector behind object and pulse wave with finite frequency band, To verify the proposed method, a computer simulation was performed for organic phantom specimen, As the results. it was verified that the reconstructed image was satisfactory even when the limitation view angle was limited to around 30 deg.