Interdigitated surface and guided-wave transducers have only recently received attention as possible tools for non-destructive testing. This may be due in part to the increasing attention being paid to piezoelectric polymers as practical transduction materials for structural sensing and actuation. However, much remains to be done to produce a rugged, monolithic device oriented toward these sorts of applications, to characterize and optimize its passive and active response, to develop excitation strategies and signal processing algorithms that in tandem can be employed for arrayed structure monitoring applications. In this paper we confine ourselves to the first two topics and report on the development and proof-of-principle testing of a monolithic interdigitated polyvinyldine fluoride (PVDF) transducer. Specifically, we report on the design and response of an interdigitated transducer with relatively large finger spacings. The finger spacing yield measureable responses in the asymptotically slow single-mode region of Lamb wave dispersion behavior for frequency-thickness products which may be useful for nondestructive testing of many mechanical and civil structural systems.
Non-destructive Testing Based on the Spatio-temporal Gradient Analysis over the Lamb Wave Field
