Nonlinear Mixing of Laser Generated Narrowband Rayleigh Surface Waves

This study presents the nonlinear mixing technique of two co-directionally travelling Rayleigh surface waves generated and detected using laser ultrasonics. The optical generation of Rayleigh waves on the specimen is obtained by shadow mask method. In conventional nonlinear measurements, the inherently small higher harmonics are greatly influenced by the nonlinearities caused by coupling variabilities and surface roughness between the transducer and specimen interface. The proposed technique is completely contactless and it should be possible to eliminate this problem. Moreover, the nonlinear mixing phenomenon yields not only the second harmonics, but also the sum and difference frequency components, which can be used to measure the acoustic nonlinearity of the specimen. In this paper, we will be addressing the experimental configurations for this technique and characterize the acoustic nonlinearity of the specimen through measuring the nonlinearity parameter ‘β’. The proposed technique is validated experimentally on Aluminum 7075 alloy specimen