Article Article
Ultrasound Material Characterization of Complex Matrix Material and Mitigation of Noise using Signal Processing Techniques

Ultrasonic inspection as a non-destructive technique is used to inspect various materials for subsurface defects caused due to air, cracks, material variation etc. Sometimes particles are added to clean materials to improve the strength and thermal conductivity of the material. While this improves the material properties, the presence of these particles causes attenuation of the ultrasonic signal, loss of signal strength and also signal scattering[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. Due to this, imaging subsurface interfaces with the complex matrix material as a primary interface is challenging. The images from subsurface interfaces are noisy and the features are not well resolved. The objective of this research study is to focus on understanding the traditional material properties of complex matrix material such as velocity, density, modulus etc., along with the filler particles’ grain size, density and distribution. A transfer function for the noise caused by the filler particles that corrupts the Ultrasonic signal was developed based on parametric model of Ultrasonic reflection from clean material and parametric model of ultrasonic reflection from the complex matrix material with particles in the size range of 150um-250um. A real sample with particles was made and imaged ultrasonically. The transfer function was applied to the A-scan data from the sample to mitigate the noise caused by these particles and the image was reconstructed to show improvement. This paper also addresses some of the challenges to this technique and potential future research work.

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