Implications of liquid impurities filled in breaking cracks on nonlinear acoustic modulation response: Mechanisms, phenomena and potential applications

Abstract

Supervised strategies for ultrasonic-based cracks detection in existing structures has been one of particular concerns in the engineering community. However, current researches mostly focus on the clean microcracks, while ignoring the fact that such cracks will be contaminated with liquid impurities (lubricants, silicone oil, etc.) due to its exposure to the operational environment. Actually, the presence of liquid may lead to a non-negligible change in the acoustic performance and interfere with damage diagnosis. The central contribution of this work is to reveal the nonlinear acoustic mechanisms and phenomena induced by the gas–liquid–solid coupling interfaces in such liquid-filled cracks and investigate their potential applications for such crack detection. Firstly, the state equation for a liquid-filled cavity in beams is established to determine the nonlinear dependences of stress–strain relationship at crack wall on the viscous and capillary pressure in liquid. Secondly, a modified acoustic modulation method, in which swept signal is used as the pumping wave to sufficiently trigger and enhance the nonlinear behaviours at the gas–liquid–solid interfaces without requiring exact reference information, is utilized for detecting sub-millimeter cracks filled with different liquid. The results suggest that the liquid fillers may cause considerable increase of the damage-related acoustic nonlinearities involving hysteresis nonlinearity, nonlinear elastic behavior and dissipative nonlinearity. Additional analysis provides compelling evidence for the following valuable conclusions: 1) the capillary pressure is a key factor that promotes conducive to the nonlinear elastic behavior that is the primary source of the first-order sum-difference frequency; 2) the viscous pressure contributes to hysteresis as well as the nonlinear dissipation, and the latter promotes the second-order sum frequency. Further, such nonlinear performance especially dissipation offer promising prospects for nonlinear acoustic diagnostic of such cracks. All results obtained in this study will aid in understanding the nonlinear wave processes and further improving the reliability of crack detection in engineering.