Nonlinear Ultrasonic Techniques for Non-destructive Assessment of Micro Damage in Material: A Review

The nondestructive assessment of the damage that occurs in components during service plays a key role for condition monitoring and residual life estimation of in-service components/structures. Ultrasound has been widely utilized for this: however most of these conventional methods using ultrasonic characteristics in the linear elastic region are only sensitive to gross defects but much less sensitive to micro-damage. Recently, the nonlinear ultrasonic technique, which uses nonlinear ultrasonic behavior such as higher-hormonic generation, sub-harmonic generation, nonlinear resonance, or mixed frequency response, has been studied as a positive method for overcoming this limitation. In this paper, overall progress in this technique is reviewed with the brief introduction of basic principle in the application of each nonlinear ultrasonic phenomenon.