Acoustic time-of-flight (ToF) measurements enable noninvasive material characterization, acoustic imaging, and defect detection and are commonly used in industrial process control, biomedical devices, and national security. When characterizing a fluid contained in a cylinder or pipe, ToF measurements are hampered by guided waves, which propagate around the cylindrical shell walls and obscure the waves propagating through the interrogated fluid. We present a technique for overcoming this limitation based on a broadband linear chirp excitation and cross correlation detection. By using broadband excitation, we exploit the dispersion of the guided waves, wherein different frequencies propagate at different velocities, thus distorting the guided wave signal while leaving the bulk wave signal in the fluid unperturbed. We demonstrate the measurement technique experimentally and using numerical simulation. We characterize the technique performance in terms of measurement error, signal-to-noise-ratio, and resolution as a function of the linear chirp center frequency and bandwidth. We discuss the physical phenomena behind the guided bulk wave interactions and how to utilize these phenomena to optimize the measurements in the fluid.
The partial-wave method takes advantage of the Christoffel equation's generality to represent waves within a waveguide. More specifically, the partial-wave method is well known for its usefulness when calculating dispersion curves for multilayered and/or anisotropic plates. That is, it is a vital component of the transfer-matrix method and the global-matrix method, which are used for dispersion curve calculation. The literature suggests that the method is also exceptionally useful for conceptual interpretation, but gives very few examples or instruction on how this can be done. In this paper, we expand on this topic of conceptual interpretation by addressing Rayleigh waves, Stoneley waves, shear horizontal waves, and Lamb waves. We demonstrate that all of these guided waves can be described using the partial-wave method, which establishes a common foundation on which many elastodynamic guided waves can be compared, translated, and interpreted. For Lamb waves specifically, we identify the characteristics of guided wave modes that have not been formally discussed in the literature. Additionally, we use what is demonstrated in the body of the paper to investigate the leaky characteristics of Lamb waves, which eventually leads to finding a correlation between oblique bulk wave propagation in the waveguide and the transmission amplitude ratios found in the literature.
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