Perfect circular polarization of elastic waves in solid media.

Elastic waves involving mechanical particle motions of solid media can couple volumetric and shear deformations, making their manipulation more difficult than electromagnetic waves. Thereby, circularly polarized waves in the elastic regime have been little explored, unlike their counterparts in the electromagnetic regime, where their practical usage has been evidenced in various applications. Here, we explore generating perfect circular polarization of elastic waves in an isotropic solid medium. We devise a novel strategy for converting a linearly polarized wave into a circularly polarized wave by employing an anisotropic medium, which induces a so-far-unexplored coupled resonance phenomenon; it describes the simultaneous occurrence of the Fabry-Pérot resonance in one diagonal plane and the quarter-wave resonance in another diagonal plane orthogonal to the former with an exact 90° out-of-phase relation. We establish a theory explaining the involved physics and validate it numerically and experimentally. As a potential application of elastic circular polarization, we present simulation results demonstrating that a circularly polarized elastic wave can detect an arbitrarily oriented crack undetectable by a linearly polarized elastic wave.

Ultrasonic barrier-through imaging by Fabry-Perot resonance-tailoring panel.

Imaging technologies that provide detailed information on intricate shapes and states of an object play critical roles in nanoscale dynamics, bio-organ and cell studies, medical diagnostics, and underwater detection. However, ultrasonic imaging of an object hidden by a nearly impenetrable metal barrier remains intractable. Here, we present the experimental results of ultrasonic imaging of an object in water behind a metal barrier of a high impedance mismatch. In comparison to direct ultrasonic images, our method yields sufficient object information on the shapes and locations with minimal errors. While our imaging principle is based on the Fabry-Perot (FP) resonance, our strategy for reducing attenuation in our experiments focuses on customising the resonance at any desired frequency. To tailor the resonance frequency, we placed an elaborately engineered panel of a specific material and thickness, called the FP resonance-tailoring panel (RTP), and installed the panel in front of a barrier at a controlled distance. Since our RTP-based imaging technique is readily compatible with conventional ultrasound devices, it can realise underwater barrier-through imaging and communication and enhance skull-through ultrasonic brain imaging.

Highly tunable low frequency metamaterial cavity for vibration localization.

Metamaterial cavity has gathered much attention recently due to its capability of localizing vibration energy. Despite the active research, however, there are still big technical challenges not solved yet. Especially, there has been no approach to maximize the wave localization performance of metamaterial cavity; therefore, there has been a possibility that obtained cavity mode does not show sufficiently high performance. Also, there is a tunability issue that whole metamaterials should be re-designed to tune the cavity frequency. Here, we present the metamaterial cavity system that can control its cavity mode frequency from 589 to 2184 Hz by adjusting the cavity length from 140 to 60 mm without re-designing the whole metamaterial based on the broad bandgap. Also, the performance of the obtained cavity mode can be improved by adjusting the length of the side beam attached to the metamaterial; the displacements are amplified more than 18-110 times. Consequently, one may easily obtain the highly localized vibration energy at the desired frequency by adjusting two geometric parameters based on the proposed metamaterial cavity system. Numerical and experimental supports are provided to validate our new metamaterial cavity system. This metamaterial cavity system is expected to provide a guideline for localizing vibration energy in various applications, such as energy harvesting, sensing or vibration dissipation.

Extremely low frequency wave localization via elastic foundation induced metamaterial with a spiral cavity.

We proposed a metamaterial which exhibits elastic wave localization at extremely low frequencies. First, we opened an extremely low bandgap via elastic foundations. Subsequently, we investigated wave localization by imposing normal defect, which is widely used to capture waves in conventional wave localization systems. However, there were limitations: wave localization was not achieved when a weak bandgap is generated, and the operating frequency of localization is still in the upper part of the bandgap. To overcome wave localization via the normal defect, we proposed a novel metamaterial with a spiral cavity which can tune the resonating frequency depending on the length of the spiral path. By imposing on the spiral cavity inside the elastic foundation-induced metamaterial, we can shift the resonating frequency of the cavity down. Finally, we carried out wave simulations, not only to support the previous eigenfrequency study for the supercell, but also to verify that the finite-size metamaterial can also achieve wave localization at the extremely low frequencies. Through wave simulations, we could observe wave localization even at 77.3 Hz, which is definitely the lower part of the extremely low bandgap.

Autoencoder-based detection of near-surface defects in ultrasonic testing.

Defect detection during pulse-echo ultrasonic testing (UT) is challenging when defects are located in a dead zone where the echoes from the defects are overshadowed by disturbances from the initial ringing signal of the UT transducer. The time-gate method is one of the most widely used approaches in UT to filter out such unwanted components, but defects in the dead zone are virtually impossible to detect using conventional methods. This paper proposes an autoencoder-based end-to-end ultrasonic testing method to detect defects within the dead zone of a transducer. The autoencoder is designed to predict the normal behavior of ultrasonic signals including disturbances, thus enabling the identification of even subtle deviations made by defects. To advance the performance of the autoencoder further with a limited amount of training data, a two-step training procedure is presented, involving training using pure normal signals measured from a defect-free specimen and re-training using pseudo-normal samples identified by the autoencoder with a smart thresholding strategy. This two-step procedure enables us to develop an adaptive autoencoder model that can be effectively employed to process the newly measured ultrasonic signals. For a demonstration of the proposed method, UT-based B-scan inspections of aluminum blocks with near-surface defects are conducted. The results suggest that the proposed method outperforms the conventional gate-based inspection approach with regard to its ability to identify the sizes and locations of near-surface defects.

Bi-annular shear-horizontal wave MPT tailored to generate the SH1 mode in a plate.

The use of a specific wave mode is critical in ultrasonic non-destructive evaluations but it is difficult to generate a specific mode, especially a higher mode at a frequency where there exist multiple wave modes. Here, we propose a compact omnidirectional shear-horizontal wave MPT (magnetostrictive patch transducer) having two annular magnetostrictive patches for the generation of a nearly pure SH1 (second shear-horizontal) mode in a plate for frequencies above the first cutoff frequency. While a common wavelength-matching approach would typically require the use of several patches and does not appear completely to eliminate unwanted omnidirectional wave modes, the proposed MPT, with only two annular patches, generates the desired SH1 mode predominantly with the unwanted SH0 (first shear-horizontal) mode nearly eliminated. For the design, the geometries of the annular patches are optimally configured to maximize the ratio of the SH1 mode to the SH0 mode. Numerical simulations and experiments confirm the effectiveness of the proposed bi-annular shear-horizontal wave MPT. Because the SH1 mode near the first cutoff frequency is highly dispersive, the developed transducer is expected to be critically useful in various applications, such as ultrasonic inspections of wall thinning.

Omnidirectional shear horizontal wave based tomography for damage detection in a metallic plate with the compensation for the transfer functions of transducer.

Guided-wave based damage detection for plates has been widely studied for structural health monitoring. Because most of the earlier studies used dispersive Lamb waves, substantial efforts had to be made to alleviate the dispersive and multi-modal nature of Lamb waves and the effect of surface conditions. In contrast, shear-horizontal (SH) waves have better propagation characteristics suitable for the detection of damages in plates, but SH waves have not been widely used due to the lack of efficient methods to generate and sense omnidirectional SH waves. The objective of this study is to construct diagnostic images of damaged plates by using omnidirectional SH waves with a special emphasis on the compensation of the frequency-dependence of the SH wave transducers. The compensation is necessary to have reliable diagnostic images because its frequency-dependent characteristics considerably can affect imaging quality if they are not considered. Consequently, simplified, yet effective, models representing the transfer functions of the omnidirectional SH wave magnetostrictive patch transducer (OSH-MPT) are developed in this paper. To visualize the position and shape of the structural damages in a metallic plate, the virtual time-reversal imaging method is used and two alternative techniques are considered to compensate for the effects of the transfer functions of transducers in the imaging processes. The imaging results after the compensation appear quite promising, suggesting that the omnidirectional SH wave based enhanced time-reversal imaging can be an efficient inspection method for plate structures.

Transmodal Fabry-Pérot Resonance: Theory and Realization with Elastic Metamaterials.

We discovered a new transmodal Fabry-Pérot resonance where one elastic-wave mode is maximally transmitted to another. It occurs when the phase difference of two dissimilar modes through an anisotropic layer becomes odd multiples of π under the reflection-free and weak mode-coupling assumptions. Unlike the well-established Fabry-Pérot resonance, the transmodal resonance must involve two coupled elastic waves between longitudinal and shear modes. The investigation into the origin of wiggly transmodal transmission spectra suggests that efficient broadband mode conversion can be achieved if the media satisfy the structural stability condition to some degree. The new resonance mechanism, also experimentally characterized, opens up new possibilities for manipulating elastic wave modes as an effective alternative to generating shear-mode ultrasound.

An omnidirectional shear-horizontal guided wave EMAT for a metallic plate.

We propose a new electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) for generation and measurement of omnidirectional shear-horizontal (SH) guided waves in metallic plates. The proposed EMAT requires a magnetic circuit configuration that allows omnidirectional SH wave transduction. It consists of a pair of ring-type permanent magnets that supply static magnetic fluxes and a specially wound coil that induces eddy currents. The Lorentz force acting along the circumferential direction is induced by the vertical static magnetic flux and the radial eddy current in a plate, resulting in omnidirectional SH wave generation. To maximize the transducer output at given excitation frequencies, optimal EMAT configurations are determined by numerical simulations and validated by experiments. The omnidirectivity of the proposed EMAT is also confirmed by the simulations and experiments.

Extreme stiffness hyperbolic elastic metamaterial for total transmission subwavelength imaging.

Subwavelength imaging by metamaterials and extended work to pursue total transmission has been successfully demonstrated with electromagnetic and acoustic waves very recently. However, no elastic counterpart has been reported because earlier attempts suffer from considerable loss. Here, for the first time, we realize an elastic hyperbolic metamaterial lens and experimentally show total transmission subwavelength imaging with measured wave field inside the metamaterial lens. The main idea is to compensate for the decreased impedance in the perforated elastic metamaterial by utilizing extreme stiffness, which has not been independently actualized in a continuum elastic medium so far. The fabricated elastic lens is capable of directly transferring subwavelength information from the input to the output boundary. In the experiment, this intriguing phenomenon is confirmed by scanning the elastic structures inside the lens with laser scanning vibrometer. The proposed elastic metamaterial lens will bring forth significant guidelines for ultrasonic imaging techniques.

Development of an omni-directional shear-horizontal wave magnetostrictive patch transducer for plates.

As an effective tool to inspect large plates, omni-directional guided wave transducers have become more widely used to form phased-array inspection systems. While omni-directional Lamb wave transducers have been successfully utilized in the systems, omni-directional Shear-Horizontal (SH) wave transducers have not been investigated. In this paper, we propose an omni-directional SH magnetostrictive patch transducer that consists of an annular magnetostrictive patch, a toroidal coil and a permanent magnet. After presenting the unique configuration of the proposed transducer and its working principle, the omni-directivity of the developed transducer is verified through simulations and experiments conducted in an aluminum plate. The frequency characteristics of the proposed transducer depending on the patch size are also investigated as the underlying reference data for future construction of an SH phased-array system.