Characterization of nonlinear ultrasonic effects using the dynamic wavelet fingerprint technique

Abstract An improved dynamic wavelet fingerprint (DWFP) technique was developed to characterize nonlinear ultrasonic effects. The white area in the fingerprint was used as the nonlinear feature to quantify the degree of damage. The performance of different wavelet functions, the effect of scale factor and white subslice ratio on the nonlinear feature extraction were investigated, and the optimal wavelet function, scale factor and white subslice ratio for maximum damage sensitivity were determined. The proposed DWFP method was applied to the analysis of experimental signals obtained from nonlinear ultrasonic harmonic and wave-mixing experiments. It was demonstrated that the proposed DWFP method can be used to effectively extract nonlinear features from the experimental signals. Moreover, the proposed nonlinear fingerprint coefficient was sensitive to micro cracks and correlated well with the degree of damage.