Acoustic microscopy of functionally graded thermal sprayed coatings using stiffness matrix method and Stroh formalism

Abstract

Acoustic microscopy of multilayered media as well as functionally graded coatings on substrate necessitates to model acoustic wave propagation in such materials. In particular, we chose to use Stroh formalism and the recursive stiffness matrix method to obtain the reflection coefficient of acoustic waves on these systems because this allows us to address the numerical instability of the conventional transfer matrix method. In addition, remarkable simplification and computational efficiency are obtained. We proposed a modified formulation of the angular spectrum of the transducer based on the theoretical analysis of a line-focus transducer for broadband acoustic microscopy. A thermally sprayed coating on substrate is treated as a functionally graded material along the depth of the coating and is approximately represented by a number of homogeneous elastic layers with exponentially graded elastic properties. The agreement between our experimental and numerical analyses on such thermal sprayed coatings with different thicknesses confirms the efficiency of the method. We proved the ability of the inversion procedure to independently determine both thickness and gradient of elastic properties. The perspective of this work is the opportunity to non-destructively measure these features in functionally graded materials.