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Laser-ultrasonics has been used with success for the microstructure evaluation of metals by measuring ultrasonic attenuation and velocity. Extension of this technique to fiber reinforced polymer composites could provide useful information such as fiber contents and porosity. Ultrasonic generation in composite materials is usually performed by using a pulsed TEA-CO2 laser operated on several transverse modes. The intensity profile of this laser could change from shot-to-shot, thus affecting the ultrasonic generation pattern and the accuracy of attenuation measurement. Two solutions are possible to overcome this problem. The first reported approach consists in numerically correcting for the diffraction effect by using a Monte Carlo integration after simultaneous acquisition of the ultrasonic signal and the laser mode pattern. The second reported approach consists in modifying the laser resonator to get a single transverse mode while maintaining high energy per pulse, and to make the diffraction correction much simpler. Both approaches have been tested on a bare carbon epoxy plate with laser generation in the thermoelastic regime. The results obtained from using either approaches show a significant improvement and are compared to those obtained by conventional ultrasonics. © 2004 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two-wave mixing based interferometry has been demonstrated to be a powerful technique for non-contact, broadband and speckle insensitive measurements of the small surface displacements produced by ultrasonic waves propagating in an object. When the object is in rapid motion along the line-of-sight of the probing laser or when the laser beam is rapidly scanned on a wavy surface, the two-wave mixing photorefractive interferometer loses sensitivity to the point it could become useless. To circumvent the Doppler frequency-shift produced by this relative motion, we propose a dynamic compensation scheme. We report a particularly simple scheme to implement this concept by monitoring the low-frequency output signal of a balanced two-wave mixing demodulator whose output is proportional to the frequency difference between the pump and signal beams, and feeding this signal back to the acousto-optic shifter. With this new concept, the two-wave mixing interferometer can operate on objects in rapid motion while maintaining its sensitivity to low frequency ultrasound. © 2003 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]