Measurements of pulsed velocity field generated by circular and rectangular piezoelectric transducers directly coupled to a block of aluminum

Abstract

A new computational tool Discrete Representation Acoustic Modelling/Solid (DREAM/S), has been developed for computing the displacement field generated by a pulse-excited transducer, directly coupled to an elastic half-space. It allows the separate determination of different components (shear, compressional, radial, axial) of displacement. This method is based on the spatial pulse response approach and gives directly the transient time-domain field. DREAM/S has already been validated mathematically in regard to analytic and exact methods. The main objective of this paper is to show the experiments performed in order to validate this software. First, a brief presentation of DREAM/S and elementary examples of computing are given. Afterward, the experimental results obtained in the case of circular and rectangular transducers directly coupled to a block of aluminum are presented and compared with the ones obtained by DREAM/S. This comparison displays a good agreement and confirms the high precision of this approach. In order to facilitate the interpretation of multichannel records, including the direct and edge waves and the reverberations from the borders of the model, both computed and recorded signals are displayed in specific format, usually applied in the geophysical imaging.