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High sensitivity is an important requirement for air-coupled ultrasonic sensors applied to materials testing. With a lower acoustic impedance than any piezoelectric material, charged cellular polypropylene (PP) offers better matching to air with a similar piezoelectric coefficient. The piezoelectric properties of charged cellular PP originate from their polarization, creating permanent internal voltage. The sensitivity of the sensor can be increased by applying additional dc bias voltage, as it has been done already for transmitters. This work presents the first ultrasonic sensor based on charged cellular PP including a high-voltage module providing dc bias voltage up to 2 kV. This bias voltage led to an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio of up to 15 ± 1 dB. The measurement of the received signal depending on the applied bias voltage is proposed as a new method of determining the internal voltage of ferroelectrets. The sensor combined with a cellular PP transmitter was applied to nondestructive testing of a rotor blade segment and glued-laminated timber, enabling imaging of the internal structure of these specimens with a thickness around 4 cm.
Partial discharge in polymeric insulation of high voltage equipment causes cumulative damage that progressively deteriorates the insulation, leading to eventual failure. The electrical detection of related discharge current pulses may be challenged by electromagnetic interference from the environment. In such situations the detection of acoustic emission from partial discharge can greatly enhance its detectability, especially when electromagnetically immune fiber-optic acoustic sensors are used. During experiments involving such fiber-optic sensors that were specifically designed for the detection of partial discharge in elastomeric insulation, an unexpected type of acoustic emission was observed in silicone elastomer specimens with tip–plate electrode configurations and under DC electrical stress. We present and discuss experimental results that indicate space charge injection and subsequent spontaneous dynamical processes as the source of the detected acoustic emission. We use sensitive conventional partial discharge measurement instrumentation to show that the apparent acoustic efficiency of the processes leading to the observed acoustic emission is very high. Acoustic emission triggered by discharge events with individual apparent charge values of only a few femtocoulombs could be detected.