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Soft plate-like membranes find application e.g. as pill or paper coatings, bio-filter membranes, and gas seals in food products. For these applications the integrity and the mechanical properties of the membrane are important. Mechanical properties of these products can be determined by stretching or bending tests, but such methods can damage these fragile products. We propose a rapid nondestructive acoustic method to estimate mechanical film characteristics with shear horizontal (in-plane shear) waves. A 23 kHz, 1-cycle square signal was excited into a thin foil with a piezoceramic pickup and received with an inductive pickup. The SNR (power) was 20 dB in 1 kHz –50 kHz bandwidth. This actuation-detection scheme can be used to excite in-plane longitudinal, shear and even elliptic waves in a thin foil. The method was validated by measuring in-plane shear wave and longitudinal wave time-of-flight TOF at different actuator-receiver separations and calculating the corresponding longitudinal and shear modulus. The samples were Mylar® sheet and coated paper. The anisotropy of MOE for Mylar sheet was close to the manufacturer specifications. For coated paper a maximum shear modulus anisotropy of 5% and a shear modulus dependence on temperature of 0.7 MPa/°C were found. Laser doppler vibrometry showed that the excited waves were confined in-plane. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important material property in the paper industry is the anisotropic stiffness distribution due to the fibrous microstructure of paper. Ultrasonic methods offer a means of determining the stiffness of sheets of paper from the anisotropic propagation characteristics of elastic Lamb waves along the machine direction (MD) and the cross direction (CD). Currently, piezoelectric ultrasonic methods are employed in the industry to measure the elastic polar diagram of paper through multiple contacting measurements made in all directions. This paper describes a new approach utilizing the INEEL Laser Ultrasonic Camera to provide a complete image of the elastic waves traveling in all directions in the plane of the paper sheet. This approach is based on optical dynamic holographic methods that record the out of plane ultrasonic motion over the entire paper surface simultaneously without scanning. The full-field imaging technique offers great potential for increasing the speed of the measurement and it ultimately provides a great deal of information concerning local property variations and flaws in the paper. This report shows the success of the method and the manner in which it yields the elastic polar diagram for the paper from the dispersive flexural or antisymmetric Lamb wave. © 2000 American Institute of Physics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]