title: On the Reliability of a Solitary Wave Based Transducer to Determine the Characteristics of Some Materials.
abstract: In the study presented in this article we investigated the feasibility and the reliability of a transducer design for the nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of the stiffness of structural materials. The NDE method is based on the propagation of highly nonlinear solitary waves (HNSWs) along a one-dimensional chain of spherical particles that is in contact with the material to be assessed. The chain is part of a built-in system designed and assembled to excite and detect HNSWs, and to exploit the dynamic interaction between the particles and the material to be inspected. This interaction influences the time-of-flight and the amplitude of the solitary pulses reflected at the transducer/material interface. The results of this study show that certain features of the waves are dependent on the modulus of elasticity of the material and that the built-in system is reliable. In the future the proposed NDE method may provide a cost-effective tool for the rapid assessment of materials' modulus.
authors.affiliation: School of Automation, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710072, China. dengwen0626@gmail.com.|Laboratory for Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 3700 O'Hara Street, 729 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA. dengwen0626@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Wen
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Deng
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 3700 O'Hara Street, 729 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA. amn70@pitt.edu.
authors.forename: Amir
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nasrollahi
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 3700 O'Hara Street, 729 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA. pir3@pitt.edu.
authors.forename: Piervincenzo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Rizzo
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Nondestructive Evaluation and Structural Health Monitoring Studies, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Pittsburgh, 3700 O'Hara Street, 729 Benedum Hall, Pittsburgh, PA 15261, USA. kal126@pitt.edu.
authors.forename: Kaiyuan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Li
keywords: concrete; highly nonlinear solitary waves; magnetostrictive sensors; modulus of elasticity; nondestructive evaluation