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This paper proposes an efficient non-destructive testing technique for composite materials. The proposed vibro-thermal wave radar (VTWR) technique couples the thermal wave radar imaging approach to low-power vibrothermography. The VTWR is implemented by means of a binary phase modulation of the vibrational excitation, using a 5 bit Barker coded waveform, followed by matched filtering of the thermal response. A 1D analytical formulation framework demonstrates the high depth resolvability and increased sensitivity of the VTWR. The obtained results reveal that the proposed VTWR technique outperforms the widely used classical lock-in vibrothermography. Furthermore, the VTWR technique is experimentally demonstrated on a 5.5 mm thick carbon fiber reinforced polymer coupon with barely visible impact damage. A local defect resonance frequency of a backside delamination is selected as the vibrational carrier frequency. This allows for implementing VTWR in the low-power regime (input power < 1 W). It is experimentally shown that the Barker coded amplitude modulation and the resultant pulse compression efficiency lead to an increased probing depth, and can fully resolve the deep backside delamination.

Local Defect Resonance (LDR) is exploited for non-destructive testing (NDT) by using ultrasonic vibrations to get a localized resonant activation of defected zones. The LDR technique relies on the local stiffness difference between the defect and the sound material. Analyzing the structure's displacement field at this localized resonance frequency reveals the defect's location and provides information about the defect's characteristics, i.e. geometry, size and depth. In this study, the opportunities and limitations of linear LDR for NDT of materials are investigated in a parametric way. Both finite element simulations and experiments (using scanning laser Doppler vibrometry) are performed for aluminum alloy and carbon fiber reinforced polymer coupons with flat bottom holes and delaminations ranging in both depth and diameter. The resonance frequencies as well as the associated defect-to-background ratios are parametrically evaluated. For shallow defects, a clear LDR is observed caused by the strong local stiffness reduction at the defect. On the contrary, deep defects are associated with a limited stiffness decrease that results in the absence of LDR behavior. The local stiffness reduction at damages is further exploited using a weighted band power calculation. It is shown that using this technique, deep defects can be detected for which no LDR behavior was observed., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Porous phononic crystal plates (PhPs) that are produced by perpendicular perforation of a uniform plate have well-known characteristics in selective manipulation (filtration, resonation, and steering) of guided wave modes. This paper introduces novel designs of porous PhPs made by an oblique perforation angle. Such obliquely perforated PhPs (OPhPs) have a non-uniform through-the-thickness cross section, which strongly affects their interaction with various wave mode types and therefore their corresponding phononic properties. Modal band analysis is performed in unit-cell scale and variation of phononic bandgaps with respect to the perforation angle is studied within the first 10 modal branches. Unit-cells with arbitrary perforation profile as well as unit-cells with optimized topology for maximized bandgap of fundamental modes are investigated. It is observed that the oblique perforation has promising effects in enhancing the unidirectional and/or omnidirectional bandgap efficiency, depending on the topology and perforation angle of OPhP.

The optimum topology of bimaterial phononic crystal (PhCr) plates with one-dimensional (1D) periodicity to attain maximum relative bandgap width of low order Lamb waves is computationally investigated. The evolution of optimized topology with respect to filling fraction of constituents, alternatively stiff scattering inclusion, is explored. The underlying idea is to develop PhCr plate structures with high specific bandgap efficiency at particular filling fraction, or further with multiscale functionality through gradient of optimized PhCr unitcell all over the lattice array. Multiobjective genetic algorithm (GA) is employed in this research in conjunction with finite element method (FEM) for topology optimization of silicon-tungsten PhCr plate unitcells. A specialized FEM model is developed and verified for dispersion analysis of plate waves and calculation of modal response. Modal band structure of regular PhCr plate unitcells with centric scattering layer is studied as a function of aspect ratio and filling fraction. Topology optimization is then carried out for a few aspect ratios, with and without prescribed symmetry, over various filling fractions. The efficiency of obtained solutions is verified as compared to corresponding regular centric PhCr plate unitcells. Moreover, being inspired by the obtained optimum topologies, definite and easy to produce topologies are proposed with enhanced bandgap efficiency as compared to centric unitcells. Finally a few cases are introduced to evaluate the frequency response of finite PhCr plate structures produced by achieved topologies and also to confirm the reliability of calculated modal band structures. Cases made by consecutive unitcells of different filling fraction are examined in order to attest the bandgap efficiency and multiscale functionality of such graded PhCr plate structures., (Crown Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)