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The extremely low acoustic impedance of polypropylene ferroelectret combined with its piezoelectric properties makes this material suitable for construction of aircoupled ultrasonic transducers for non-destructive testing. For the fabrication of transducers with a stable quality, the reproducibility of their key parameters is of interest.
The reproducibility was evaluated by means of (i) impedance spectroscopy and (ii) pulse-echo measurements. (i) Impedance spectroscopy was applied to identify the resonance frequency, the coupling factor and the acoustic impedance of several nominally identical transducers. (ii) Pulse-echo measurements yielded the signal form of these transducers.
The variation of the signal amplitude measured with pulseecho technique was about 10 dB. A part of this variation Comes from the deposition of transducer electrodes and another part from local variations of ferroelectret properties. The variation of the signal amplitude was caused by the observed variation of the coupling factor, which was also about 10 dB. The variation of the acoustic impedance was only about 1 dB, thus having no effect on the variation of the signal amplitude.
These results indicate that the variability can be reduced by improving the control of electrode deposition and by optimizing the production technology affecting the reproducibility of material properties.
In recent years eure monitoring with ultrasonic methods became more important. An on-line measurement System for industrial applications is presented in this paper. It operates in through-transmission and the measured parameters are the sound velocity and the attenuation of the sound wave. An objective of this paper is to establish the ränge of possible applications for an ultrasonic eure monitoring System.
The curing conditions play an important role in the quality assurance of composite products.
Especially as composite materials are widely used in high tech areas so that they are required to fulfil high quality Standards. Some problems which occur during curing, for instance undercuring, can hardly be detected using Standard NDT investigations, mainly because they are manifested only at high temperatures, particularly close to glass-rubber-transition. On-line eure monitoring has the outstanding advantage that it can monitor the material parameters even at the highest temperatures possible.
In recent years eure monitoring with ultrasonic methods has become more populär. In comparison to dielectric methods mechanical parameters are measured directly. The quantities to be measured are the velocity and the attenuation of the sound wave. On this basis the storage and loss modulus can be calculated. Depending on the form of excitation with longitudinal or transversal waves these moduli are referred to as long wave or shear modulus.
Well developed Computer based technology and sensor materials are available in the non-destructive testing (NDT) market. The measuring equipment employed a commercial NDT System, which worked computer-aided. With a special Software the demands of automatic Operation under industrial conditions was accomplished. This measurement equipment was tested on composites. Its structure, performance and some practical results will be presented in the following paper.