Detecting Localized Plastic Strain by a Scanning Collinear Wave Mixing Method

When the frequencies of a pair of collinear shear and longitudinal waves satisfy the resonant condition, mixing of these two primary waves generates a third, resonant shear wave that propagates in the direction opposite to the propagating direction of the primary shear wave. In this study, experiments were conducted to demonstrate that the acoustic nonlinearity parameter at the location of the mixing zone can be obtained by measuring the resonant shear wave. Since the location of the mixing zone can be controlled by adjusting the trigger time of the transducers that generate the primary waves, this collinear wave mixing technique enables the scanning of a bar sample to measure the distribution of acoustic nonlinearity along the bar. To demonstrate this scanning capability, bar samples with non-uniform acoustic nonlinearity parameters were fabricated by inducing localized plastic deformation at known locations. Scanning collinear wave mixing tests conducted on such bar samples clearly identified the locations of the plastic zone. These results show that collinear wave mixing is a promising method for scanning the test sample to map out the distribution of localized plastic deformation.