In the last decade there has been an increasing attention on the use of highly- and weakly- nonlinear solitary waves in engineering and physics. These waves can form and travel in nonlinear systems such as one-dimensional chains of spherical particles. One engineering application of solitary waves is the fabrication of acoustic lenses, which are employed in a variety of fields ranging from biomedical imaging and surgery to defense systems and damage detection. In this paper we propose to couple an acoustic lens to a wafer-type lead zirconate titanate transducer (PZT) to harvest energy from the vibration of an object tapping the lens. The lens is composed of a circle array made of chains of particles in contact with a polycarbonate material where the nonlinear waves coalesce into linear waves. The PZT located at the designed focal point converts the mechanical energy carried by the stress wave into electricity to power a load resistor. The performance of the designed harvester is compared to a conventional cantilever beam, and the experimental results show that the power generated with the nonlinear lens has the same order of magnitude of the beam.
We present a methodology to assess slender beams by means of highly nonlinear solitary waves. This is accomplished by understanding the coupling mechanism between highly nonlinear solitary waves propagating along a granular system and a beam in contact with the granular medium. Nonlinear solitary waves are compact non-dispersive waves that can form and travel in nonlinear systems such as one-dimensional chains of particles. In the study presented in this paper, the waves are generated by the mechanical impact of a striker and are detected by means of sensor beads located along the chain. We investigated numerically and experimentally the effect on the solitary waves of slender beams of different modulus, length, boundary condition, and axial stress. We found that the geometric and mechanical properties of the beam or thermal stress applied to the beam alter certain features of the solitary waves. In the future, these findings may be used to develop a novel sensing system for the Nondestructive Evaluation of beams.
In this paper, we present a non-destructive inspection method for immersed waveguide. A laser operating at 532 nm is
used to excite leaky guided waves on an aluminum plate immersed in water. The plate has a few artificial defects. An
array of immersion transducers is used to detect the propagating waves. A signal processing based on continuous wavelet
transform is utilized to extract a few damage-sensitive features that are used in an outlier analysis and in a probabilistic-based
imaging method. The experimental results show that the proposed system can be used for the inspection of
underwater waveguides.
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