Experimental characterization of the propagation of guided acoustic waves in pipe strings

This paper experimentally characterizes the propagation of guided acoustic waves in pipe strings. It verifies through experiments the dispersion phenomenon in cylindrical waveguides and shows how it matches the expected theoretical results that were previously derived in the literature and also experimentally confirms that pipe strings have certain passbands and stopbands that will allow signals with certain frequencies to propagate and will inhibit others. The theoretical dispersion relation was computed for frequencies between 0 and 5 kHz. Then, an experimental testbed was used to produce measured results which were found to agree nicely with the theoretical results.