Focusing Phase Imaging for Lamb Wave Phased Array

In Lamb wave-based Structural Health Monitoring, amplitude damage imaging is commonly used because the defects feature can be easily amplified by summing all the response signals together. However, the grating and side lobes affect the imaging quality and blind areas further restrict the inspection area. Considering that the existing phase-based imaging algorithms are either unfit for dispersive Lamb wave or strict to many requirements to guarantee better performance, inspired by the absence of phase information in focusing phased array, a novel Focusing Phase Imaging (FPI) method for Lamb wave phased array is developed. The main contribution of the paper is introducing the phase information to focusing phased array. By applying the inverse-dispersion effect to the excitation signals and the superposition operation, the energy can be focused at every inspection point. The phase damage index is constructed by directly measuring the degree of consistency and alignment of the instantaneous phases. The experiments for the circular and linear array under various excitation signals with multiple defects verify that the FPI is effective for both surface damage and through-hole damage. The proposed algorithm is superior for its ability in energy focusing for defects, the capability in suppression of grating and side lobes, strong anti-disturbance ability from boundary reflection, the nonexistence of imaging blind area, and its adaptability for various excitation parameters and array layout.

Boundary and interface conditions in the relaxed micromorphic model: Exploring finite-size metastructures for elastic wave control

In this paper, we establish well-posed boundary and interface conditions for the relaxed micromorphic model that are able to unveil the scattering response of fully finite-size metamaterial samples. The resulting relaxed micromorphic boundary value problem is implemented in finite-element simulations describing the scattering of a square metamaterial sample whose side counts nine unit cells. The results are validated against a direct finite-element simulation encoding all the details of the underlying metamaterial’s microstructure. The relaxed micromorphic model can recover the scattering metamaterial’s behavior for a wide range of frequencies and for all possible angles of incidence, thus showing that it is suitable to describe dynamic anisotropy. Finally, thanks to the model’s computational performances, we can design a metastructure combining metamaterials and classical materials in such a way that it acts as a protection device while providing energy focusing in specific collection points. These results open important perspectives for the short-term design of sustainable structures that can control elastic waves and recover energy.

Self-Powered Sensors: New Opportunities and Challenges from Two-Dimensional Nanomaterials

Nanomaterials have gained considerable attention over the last decade, finding applications in emerging fields such as wearable sensors, biomedical care, and implantable electronics. However, these applications require miniaturization operating with extremely low power levels to conveniently sense various signals anytime, anywhere, and show the information in various ways. From this perspective, a crucial field is technologies that can harvest energy from the environment as sustainable, self-sufficient, self-powered sensors. Here we revisit recent advances in various self-powered sensors: optical, chemical, biological, medical, and gas. A timely overview is provided of unconventional nanomaterial sensors operated by self-sufficient energy, focusing on the energy source classification and comparisons of studies including self-powered photovoltaic, piezoelectric, triboelectric, and thermoelectric technology. Integration of these self-operating systems and new applications for neuromorphic sensors are also reviewed. Furthermore, this review discusses opportunities and challenges from self-powered nanomaterial sensors with respect to their energy harvesting principles and sensing applications.

Turbulent wave attractors in large-aspect ratio domains.

<div>Ocean abyss is an example of a system with continuous stratification subject to large-scale tidal forcing. Owing to specific dispersion relation of internal waves, the domains bounded by sloping boundaries may support wave patterns with wave rays converging to closed trajectories (geometric attractors) as result of iterative focusing reflections. Previously the behavior of kinetic energy in wave attractors has been investigated in domains with comparable scales of depth and horizontal length. As the geometric aspect ratio of the domain increases, the dynamic pattern of energy focusing may significantly evolve both in laminar and turbulent regimes. The present paper shows that the energy density in domains with large aspect ratio can significantly increase. In numerical simulations the input forcing has been introduced at global scale by prescribing small-amplitude deformations of the upper bound of the liquid domain. The evolution of internal wave motion in such system has been computed numerically for different values of the forcing amplitude. The behavior of the large-aspect-ratio system has been compared to the well-studied case of the system with depth-to-length ratio of order unity.  A number of most typical situations has been analyzed in terms of behavior of integral mechanical quantities such as total dissipation, mean kinetic energy and energy fluctuations in laminar and turbulent cases. The relative mean kinetic energy (normalized by the kinetic energy of the liquid domain undergoing rigid-body oscillations with the amplitude of the wavemaker), may increase by order of magnitude as compared to low-aspect-ratio system.<br>It was shown previously, that in the case of aspect ratio close to unity, the transition to wave turbulence regime is associated with a cascade of triadic wave-wave interactions. Now it is shown that for large aspect ratios the energy cascade in the system is due to generation of superharmonic waves corresponding to integer (including zero) multiples of the forcing frequency. As forcing amplitude increases beyond certain value, an abrupt change is observed in behavior of relative mean kinetic energy and spectra, accompanied with appearance of additional harmonic components corresponding to half-integer (including 1/2) and integer multiples of the forcing frequency.  </div><div> </div>

Study on low frequency sound insulation characteristic of thin acoustic black hole

We use numerical and experimental methods to investigate the low frequency sound insulation characteristic of designed thin acoustic black hole (ABH). The numerical results show that the sound energy focusing effect plays a leading role in low frequency sound insulation of designed ABH, and the reflection at the edge of ABH is the main reason of sound insulation in medium and high frequencies. Experimental results display that the Sound Transmission Loss (STL) of the designed ABH is higher than 30 dB below 700 Hz, which shows that the isolated acoustic waves are more than 95%. The low frequency sound insulation performance of proposed ABHs is much better than the traditional acoustic materials, which has great potential applications for low frequency sound insulation.

Multichannel synchrosqueezing generalized S-transform for time-frequency analysis of seismic traces

The synchrosqueezing generalized S-transform (SSGST) is commonly used to generate an isofrequency component of a signal by squeezing the decomposed frequency components of the signal. However, for seismic signals, the single-trace process can have a lack of lateral information in the squeezed results and lead to some discontinuous geologic information that will mislead the interpreter. Thus, to improve the stability of SSGST, we have developed a multichannel seismic trace squeezing method. Multichannel SSGST (MSSGST) considers the decomposed frequency components of neighboring traces of the analysis seismic trace and then reconstructs the center trace. Therefore, compared with SSGST, the multichannel processing improves the stability of the squeezing and produces more laterally continuous results that properly follow the geologic phenomenon. The effectiveness of MSSGST is validated using various field data. We use the application to demonstrate the potential of multichannel squeezing to perform well at (1) improving the energy focusing and continuity of the decomposed frequency components, (2) depicting the boundaries of geologic structures, and (3) identifying the thin layers.