Thromboembolism in the cerebrovasculature can cause high morbidity and mortality. Embolectomy is one of the emergency procedures performed to remove emboli; however, the approach such as aspiration or stent retriever are empirically selected. An inappropriate selection of approach can influence the success rate during embolectomy and affect levels of brain damage. Therefore, understanding the composition of clots and their mechanical properties can lead to an appropriate treatment strategy for physicians. In this study, we investigated how the composition of human clots can affect their mechanical properties as quantified using acoustic radiation force optical coherence elastography (ARF-OCE) in a non-contact manner. Five red blood cells (RBCs) concentrations were fabricated from fibrin rich (21% RBC) to RBC rich (95% RBC). A 7.5 MHz highly focused transducer was used to provide acoustic radiation force exerted on the surface of the clots and an optical coherence tomography system was used to measure the wave propagation. The study showed that the trend of the wave velocities decreased with the RBC concentration increased. The study demonstrated that ARF-OCE could be a promising tool to quantify the mechanical properties of clots to inform treatment strategy for clinical interventionalists.
Ultrasonic guided-wave testing can greatly benefit from (1) an ability to provide quantitative information on the damage that is being detected, and (2) an ability to select the best mode-frequency combination for maximum sensitivity to a given type of damage. Achieving these capabilities in complex structures (e.g. nonprismatic structures such as a stiffened panel in aerospace fuselages) is a nontrivial task. This paper will discuss an improved Global-Local (GL) method where the geometrical “local” discontinuity (e.g. the stiffener) is modelled by traditional FE discretization and the rest of the structure (“global” part) is modelled by Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) cross-sectional discretization. The boundaries of the “local” domain and the “global” domain are then matched in terms of wave displacement and stresses. GL models have been proposed in the past using theoretical (Lamb) wave solutions that only apply to isotropic plates. The authors have also previously studied GL methods using the SAFE approach for application to multi-layered anisotropic plates for which theoretical solutions are either not existent or hard to obtain. This work will extend recent research on these methods by optimizing the Matlab routine that is used to run the GL code, correcting some formulation errors that were present in the previous edition, and studying the specific case of a composite panel stiffened with cocured stringers that is representative of modern commercial aircraft construction (e.g. Boeing 787). The newlyformulated GL method will be shown to provide excellent results that can help designing a guided-wave test on these aircraft components for optimum detection of relevant damage that can be induced by impacts (including skin delaminations, stringer heel cracks, and stringer to skin disbonds). Other applications of the GL methods beyond stiffened aircraft panels will be discussed.
Composite materials make up an increasing portion of today’s aerospace structures (see, e.g. Boeing 787 and Airbus 380). These aircrafts’ fuselage, for example, is composed of a laminated composite skin connected to composite stringers and C-frames. Of primary importance is the detection of damage in these built-up structures, whether caused by the manufacturing process or in service (e.g. impacts). A related issue is the characterization of the composite elastic mechanical properties, that can also be related to the quantification of potential damage. Guided elastic waves propagating in the ~100s kHz regime lend themselves to provide the necessary sensitivity to these two conditions (damage and mechanical properties). This presentation will discuss the use of these waves to provide information on both damage and mechanical properties of composite structures that are typically used in modern commercial aircraft fuselages. In particular, a scanning system using air-coupled ultrasonic transducers and transfer function reconstruction will be presented for the detection and the quantification of impact-induced damage in laboratory test panels representative of fuselage construction. An optimization scheme that uses Simulated Annealing and the Semi-Analytical Finite Element (SAFE) technique as the forward model will be used to identify the layer-by-layer elastic properties of the composite skin laminate by observation of the guided wave phase velocity dispersive behavior.
The identification of the acoustic Green’s function (or, equivalently, the dynamic transfer function) of a medium is of interest to many fields, including structural testing, inspections and health monitoring. This paper will focus on the passive identification utilizing pairs of receivers and exploiting dynamic excitations that occur naturally in the structure. Several opportunities for this passive extraction exist, including: bridges under traffic excitation, buildings under seismic excitation, oceans under natural flows, and railroad tracks under train wheels excitations, among many others. A special signal processing approach is proposed to ensure that the Green’s function (or the transfer function) identification occurs without the influence of the random and generally unknown excitation and without the influence of uncorrelated noise that may affect the receivers. In particular, a special version of Welch’s periodogram technique is proposed where averages of the two outputs are taken both for the same time segments (“intra-segment” averaging) and for different time segments (“inter-segment” averaging) in order to eliminate the influence of noise at both receivers, in addition to eliminating the excitation source spectrum. It will be demonstrated, both analytically and experimentally, that this special signal processing is optimum for robust dual-output passive transfer function estimation. This technique will be then applied to the high-speed inspection of rail tracks by passive extraction of the rail acoustic Green’s function in the ultrasonic regime from the natural train wheel excitations. In this application, the dynamic outputs are collected by pairs of non-contact air-coupled receivers that have a 2-in stand-off from the rail surface. Changes in the passively-extracted Green’s function are then related to the presence of internal flaws (e.g. cracks) in the rail. Previously. a prototype based on this concept has been built and tested at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, Colorado, at speeds up to 80 mph. These speeds are unprecedented in the field of rail inspections, that are today carried out at ~30 mph at most by specialized test vehicles. This paper presents preliminary results from a second field test performed in the Fall of 2018 at TTC using a revised prototype design an speeds up to 40 mph. The successful development of this technique would revolutionize many aspects of rail maintenance by, for example, allowing regular trains to perform the inspections with no traffic disruption and great opportunity for redundancy due to the multiple train passes on the same track.
Ultrasonic rail inspection is the most commonly implemented method for detecting internal rail defects. While the conventional ultrasound wheel probe has gained its popularity within rail maintenance community, it suffers from the limited test speeds (25 mph at most). This paper presents the state-of-the-art developments in ultrasonic rail inspection technique that utilizes non-contact receivers and no active transmitters. The transfer function between two points of the rail is reconstructed by deconvolutions of multiple pairs of receivers that sense the acoustics naturally excited in the rail by the running wheels. The deconvolution process eliminates the random effect of the excitation to reconstruct a stable acoustic transfer function of the rail. A fixed bulk delay and frequency selection technique are introduced to facilitate the power spectral density estimation for robust transfer function reconstruction. A multivariate analysis based on selected features extracted from various frequency bands is conducted on the signals recorded by multiple sensor pairs respectively. Furthermore, damage index traces based on data from different sensor pairs provide system redundancy for improved reliability with the voting logic for damage detection. The proposed approach lends itself to extremely high testing speeds (as fast as the service train speed, e.g. 60 mph and above), that would enable the real-time evaluation of rail track integrity at train operational speeds. A prototype based on this passive-only inspection idea has been constructed and tested with the DOTX216 testing vehicle of the Federal Railroad Administration at the Transportation Technology Center (TTC) in Pueblo, CO in September 2016. Test runs were made at various speeds from 25 mph to 80 mph (the maximum speed allowed on the test track). The results show the feasibility of stable reconstruction of the transfer function from the random wheel excitation, as well as the detection of joints and welds present in the track. Some tests were also conducted on TTC Defect Farm showing the potential for defect defection.
High Energy Wide Area Blunt Impact (HEWABI) due to ground service equipment can often occur in aircraft structures causing major damages. These Wide Area Impact Damages (WAID) can affect the internal components of the structure, hence are usually not visible nor detectable by typical one-sided NDE techniques and can easily compromise the structural safety of the aircraft. In this study, the development of an NDI method is presented together with its application to impacted aircraft frames. The HEWABI from a typical ground service scenario has been previously tested and the desired type of damages have been generated, so that the aircraft panels could become representative study cases. The need of the aircraft industry for a rapid, ramp-friendly system to detect such WAID is here approached with guided ultrasonic waves (GUW) and a scanning tool that accesses the whole structure from the exterior side only. The wide coverage of the specimen provided by GUW has been coupled to a differential detection approach and is aided by an outlier statistical analysis to be able to inspect and detect faults in the challenging composite material and complex structure. The results will be presented and discussed with respect to the detection capability of the system and its response to the different damage types. Receiving Operating Characteristics curves (ROC) are also produced to quantify and assess the performance of the proposed method. Ongoing work is currently aimed at the penetration of the inner components of the structure, such as shear ties and C-frames, exploiting different frequency ranges and signal processing techniques. From the hardware and tool development side, different transducers and coupling methods, such as air-coupled transducers, are under investigation together with the design of a more suitable scanning technique.
In the field of non-destructive evaluation, defect detection and visualization can be performed exploiting different
techniques relying either on an active or a passive approach. In the following paper the passive technique is investigated
due to its numerous advantages and its application to thermography is explored.
In previous works, it has been shown that it is possible to reconstruct the Green’s function between any pair of points
of a sensing grid by using noise originated from diffuse fields in acoustic environments. The extraction of the Green’s
function can be achieved by cross-correlating these random recorded waves. Averaging, filtering and length of the
measured signals play an important role in this process. This concept is here applied in an NDE perspective utilizing
thermal fluctuations present on structural materials. Temperature variations interacting with thermal properties of the
specimen allow for the characterization of the material and its health condition. The exploitation of the thermographic
image resolution as a dense grid of sensors constitutes the basic idea underlying passive thermography. Particular
attention will be placed on the creation of a proper diffuse thermal field, studying the number, placement and excitation
signal of heat sources. Results from numerical simulations will be presented to assess the capabilities and performances
of the passive thermal technique devoted to defect detection and imaging of structural components.
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