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The acousto-optic effect in liquid crystals (LCs) has previously been exploited to build large area acoustic sensors for visualising ultrasound fields, opening up the field of acoustography. There is an opportunity to simplify this technique and open new application areas by employing polymer dispersed LC (PDLC) thin films instead of aligned LC layers. In PDLCs, the normally opaque film becomes transparent under the influence of an acoustic field (e.g. when surface acoustic waves are propagating in the material under the film). This is called acoustic clearing and is visible by eye. There is potential for producing ultrasonic sensors which can be ‘painted on’ to a component, giving direct visualisation of the ultrasonic field without requiring scanning. We demonstrate the effect by using PDLC films to characterise a resonant mode of a flexural air-coupled transducer. Visualisation was quick, with a switching time of a few seconds. The effect shows promise for ultrasound sensing applications for transducer characterisation and NDE.

Geopolymer is an uprising technology that is being studied worldwide. Geopolymer raw materials are basically aluminosilicate source materials. However, this technology is yet to infiltrate into pipelines and coating industries which initiated our research idea. The idea of creating universal geopolymer based coating material is mainly to help oil and gas industry reduce its maintenance cost. Kaolin based geopolymer paste was coated on glass reinforced epoxy (GRE) substrates which are majorly used as pipeline material in the oil and gas industry at Saudi Arabia. Kaolin and white clay was chosen as raw material to study the possibilities of utilizing underused aluminosilicate raw materials for geopolymer coating. To obtain suitable formulation, Na2SiO3/NaOH ratio was varied from 0.40 untill 0.60 while other parameters such as solid/liquid ratio and NaOH molarity were kept constant at values as per previous works. Geopolymer coated GRE substrates were then subjected to water absorption, flexural strength and hardness test to validate our findings. Water absorption is a crucial test as for coating materials which justifies the pratical usability of the coating product. Upon testing, kaolin and white clay based geopolymer coating each shows promising properties at Na2SiO3/NaOH ratio of 0.45 and 0.50 each.

Electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMATs) have been used to generate and detect Rayleigh waves in order to identify surface cracking in aluminium bars and rails. B-scans produced during scans of samples were used to determine the presence of surface defects. Additionally, the differences between signal enhancements due to wave interference at the crack produced by normal (900) and angled cracks in the B-scans were used to classify samples in order to decide an appropriate depth calibration curve for depth estimation. Classification was done using an image processing algorithm that selected the best features for classification, and used these to identify similar patterns in unclassified B-scans.

To improve understanding of the mechanical behavior of granular materials it is important to be able to quantify the relative arrangement of the grains, i.e. the fabric. This can be done, for example, by measuring the orientations of the particles (e.g. the long axis orientation) or by considering the orientations of the vectors normal to each grain‐grain contact. In two dimensional (2D) analyses this information can be obtained by digital image analysis of images of thin sections obtained from an optical microscope. While such data is useful, granular materials of engineering interest are three dimensional (3D) materials and quantification of the 3D fabric is necessary. Micro Computed‐Tomography (μCT) together with 3D image analysis has emerged as a promising technique for obtaining the 3D data required. This paper aims to highlight the challenges associated with using image analysis to provide quantitative information on fabric. While automated image segmentation has proved to produce reasonable results in some cases, it is sometimes less successful when dealing with highly irregular and angular soil grains. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of 2D and 3D segmentation techniques that rely on the watershed segmentation algorithm. The primary material considered is Reigate Silver Sand, a natural quartzitic sand with grain diameters in the range of 150–300 μm. While the sand considered is primarily of interest to geotechnical engineers, the results of this study will be of interest to anyone seeking to quantify granular material fabric using either 2D microscopy data or μCT 3D data sets.