When an ultrasound pulse passes through an attenuating medium it experiences a frequency-dependent attenuation. Since the attenuation coefficient is sensitive to the microstructure of a material, and has been widely used in the nondestructive evaluation of material properties such as hardness, grain size, porosity and fatigue. Accurate measurement of the ultrasonic attenuation coefficient can be beneficial to the investigations of ultrasonic propagation in materials. There have been many researches on the relationships between material properties and the frequency-dependence attenuation coefficients. In their work, the ultrasonic broadband pulse immersion technique was applied to measure the attenuation coefficient in solids. Because of the broadband nature of the pulse used, its center frequency does not stay constant, but rather experiences a frequency downshift, and it is hard to determine the effective bandwidth of the broadband pulse. Moreover, these broadband pulse techniques cannot determine the attenuation when the coefficient in a material is relatively low. This work provides an ultrasonic immersion method for measurement of attenuation coefficients of materials using signal frequency tone burst signals. Several attenuation values can be obtained by adjusting the pulse transmission frequency, then a frequency-dependence attenuation curve can be plotted with these values using a nonlinear least curve fitting method. Attenuation coefficient values at any frequency can be obtained by this fitting curve. This method is then applied to measure the attenuation coefficients of some most commonly used materials and shows advantages over the broadband pulse technique. The provided results would help support the further investigation for the ultrasonic non-destructive evaluation of materials.


Measuring the Frequency-Dependent Attenuation Coefficients of Solids Using a Pulse-Echo Ultrasonic Method

No proceedings papers in 2020. Video only.

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