Laser ultrasonic imaging of defect in bimetallic media with frequency domain synthetic aperture focusing technology

A laser ultrasonics (LU) based frequency domain synthetic aperture focusing technology (LUB-F-SAFT), which uses 2D equivalent velocity (SEV) and fuses multi-mode ultrasound, is developed to image the internal horizontal hole defects with a diameter of similar to 1.0 mm in bimetallic composites. Bulk waves non-destructively excited by a line-shaped laser are detected by a vibrometer away from the excitation. The results indicate that the LUB-F-SAFT with SEV can improve the imaging quality and locating capability, and the testing error is about 0.02 mm. The improvement in the imaging quality using SEV for different ratios of the first layer thickness to defect-to-interface distances is discussed. In addition, a theoretical approach based on the directionality of the detected ultrasound is applied to determine a reasonable excitation-detection distance for better defect imaging. A LUB-F-SAFT imaging combining multi-mode waves is employed to improve the range of defect profiles. The results show that the range of the imaged defect profile becomes larger using the multi-mode fused LUB-F-SAFT imaging, which is an improvement of about 49.2% compared to the shear wave imaging result.