A freestanding oscillator for resonant-ultrasound microscopy

Resonant-ultrasound microscopy with a freestanding rod oscillator has been developed for mapping a material's elastic properties in a localized surface region, for the purpose of evaluating elastic stiffness through the resonance frequency of the oscillator contacting the specimen by its tip. A stronger biasing static magnetic field makes the ferritic steel oscillator plumb without any other mechanical support except tip-sample contact. For a noncontacting acoustical coupling, the longitudinal vibration of the oscillator is excited and detected with a surrounding solenoid coil by the magnetostrictive effect. This freestanding configuration realizes only a mechanical "point" contact between the oscillator and the sample surface, which yields accurate measurement of the local elastic stiffness. As an illustrated example, the new microscopy method is applied to an SCS- 6 SiCf/Ti-6Al-4V composite to visualize its elastic-stiffness distribution.