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Advanced transducer materials have become increasingly important with the rapid development of the internet of things and flexible electronics. Herein, fully transparent flexible polyvinylidene fluoride/polydimethylsiloxane (PVDF/PDMS) composite piezoelectric films are fabricated using scrape coating techniques based on electrospun PVDF nanofiber films. Compared to the electrospun PVDF, the PVDF/PDMS not only owns high transparency and a more uniform and stable structure but also has superior piezoelectric properties. Based on the electrospun PVDF and the PVDF/PDMS films, flexible piezoelectric sensors are developed, which can effectively detect weak mechanical signals including finger tapping and bending signals, radial artery pulses, and environmental sound signals. The PVDF/PDMS sensor performs better than the electrospun PVDF sensor and presents great potential for applications in flexible sensors and transducers. Especially, thanks to their high transparency, the PVDF/PDMS composite piezoelectric films lend themselves easily to application fields requiring transparent sensors such as imperceptible sensors and human‐machine interfaces, display devices, electronic skins, intelligent windows, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Nonlinear Lamb wave imaging of micro-damage is achieved based on wavefield data. • A new approach is proposed for weak nonlinear feature enhancement. • Demonstrated capability of accurately imaging the fatigue crack tip. • Visualize the wave field of the harmonics. The traditional nonlinear ultrasonic technique, as typified by the second-harmonic generation and the frequency mixing response, can be employed to identify and characterize the micro-damage. However, the research on micro-damage characterization using nonlinear Lamb wave imaging technique remains an ongoing challenge and is rarely reported. A method called standardized amplitude difference is proposed for nonlinear feature enhancement, and further for fatigue crack imaging based on the wavefield data. Wavefield data contain abundant information on the spatial and temporal variation of propagating waves in the damaged structure. The nonlinearity index β ′ of the signal difference under the high and low incident wave amplitudes is calculated for fatigue crack imaging. Two scanning methods, including local scanning and global scanning, are introduced to image the fatigue crack tip and visualize the wave field of the harmonics respectively. The experimental validation, based on the imaging results of an aluminum alloy plate specimen with a barely visible fatigue crack and a steel plate with a blind hole, manifests that the proposed method can be used to enhance and extract the nonlinear features and suppress the fundamental frequency, so as to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the micro-damage imaging results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The total focusing method (TFM) is considered as the standard in ultrasonic phased array imaging and plays a vital role in industrial non-destructive testing (NDT). By utilizing the full matrix capture (FMC) dataset, the TFM can focus on every point within the specified imaging region, and is more accurate than the traditional ultrasonic phased array imaging methods. However, the TFM is essentially a delay and sum technique that often operates linearly on the time-domain signals and takes no prior information into account, so its image quality remains inadequate when dealing with defects in close proximity or scattering materials. To address this problem, this paper formulates the imaging principle of the TFM as a Boolean matrix and establishes the discretized tensor-based model. Subsequently, the model is addressed by employing the sparse regularization strategy, taking into some characteristics of industrial NDT. Regarding the solution algorithm, due to the generation of negative values by the fast iterative shrinkage threshold algorithm (FISTA), this paper introduces the rectified linear unit (ReLU) function as a non-negative constraint and presents a dedicated solution algorithm (ReLU-FISTA) for acquiring detection results. Through verification of simulation and experiment, the proposed approach exhibits superior capabilities of defect characterization and noise suppression when compared to the TFM, leading to substantial enhancements in image quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]