Absolute Measurement of Material Nonlinear Parameters Using Noncontact Air-Coupled Reception

Nonlinear ultrasound is often employed to assess microdamage or nonlinear elastic properties of a material, and the nonlinear parameter is commonly used to quantify damage sate and material properties. Among the various factors that influence the measurement of nonlinear parameters, maintaining a constant contact pressure between the receiver and specimen is important for repeatability of the measurement. The use of an air-coupled transducer may be considered to replace the contact receiver. In this paper, a method of measuring the relative and absolute nonlinear parameters of materials is described using an air-coupled transducer as a receiver. The diffraction and attenuation corrections are newly derived from an acoustic model for a two-layer medium and the nonlinear parameter formula with all corrections is defined. Then, we show that the ratio of the relative nonlinear parameter of the target sample to the reference sample is equal to that of the absolute nonlinear parameter, and this equivalence is confirmed by measurements on three systems of aluminum samples. The proposed method allows the absolute measurement of the nonlinear parameter ratio or the nonlinear parameter without calibration of the air-coupled receiver and removes restrictions on the selection of reference samples.