MEASURING ACOUSTIC NONLINEARITY BY COLLINEAR MIXING WAVES

It is well known that the acoustic nonlinearity parameter beta is correlated to fatigue damage in metallic materials. Various methods have been developed to measure beta. One of the most often used methods is the harmonic generation technique, in which beta is obtained by measuring the magnitude of the second order harmonic waves. An inherent weakness of this method is the difficulty in distinguishing material nonlinearity from the nonlinearity of the measurement system. In this paper, we demonstrate the possibility of using collinear mixing waves to measure beta. The wave mixing method is based on the interaction between two incident waves in a nonlinear medium. Under certain conditions, such interactions generate a third wave of different frequency. This generated third wave is also called resonant wave, because its amplitude is unbounded if the medium has no attenuation. Such resonant waves are less sensitive to the nonlinearity of the measurement system, and have the potential to identify the source location of the nonlinearity. In this work, we used a longitudinal wave and a shear wave as the incident waves. The resonant shear wave is measured experimentally on samples made of aluminum and steel, respectively. Numerical simulations of the tests were also performed using a finite difference method.