Increasing the sensitivity of ultrasonic transmission measurements for elastic material parameter estimation

Abstract Ultrasonic transmission measurements can be used for material characterization, as the propagation time of sound waves and thus their velocity depends on the elastic material parameters. Measurement results for the elastic material parameters are acquired non-destructively using ultrasonic transmission measurements of hollow cylindrical polymer specimens. To determine the material parameters, an inverse approach is used comparing measurements with simulated data. Previous studies show that the procedure exhibits low sensitivity with respect to the shear parameters of the material. In order to increase the sensitivity, we propose to apply a spatially annular excitation on the base of the specimen. As a measure to analyze the sensitivities with respect to all parameters and their linear independence, we observe the volume of the parallelotope of the sensitivity vectors. Here, a scaled boundary finite element formulation of wave propagation in the specimen is expanded to yield derivative information directly, and a sensitivity analysis can be carried out efficiently. Finally, the results of this sensitivity analysis with regard to the annular excitation are also applied to the measurement setup.