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Conventionally, the ultrasonic polar scan (UPS) records the amplitude or time of flight in reflection or transmission using short ultrasonic pulses for a wide range of incidence angles, resulting in a unique fingerprint of the critical bulk wave angles of the material at the insonified spot. Here, we investigate the use of quasi-harmonic ultrasound (bursts) in a polar scan experiment, experimentally as well as numerically. It is shown that the nature of the fingerprint drastically changes, and reveals the positions of the leaky Lamb angles. To compare with experiments, both plane wave and bounded beam simulations have been performed based on the recursive stiffness matrix method. Whereas the plane wave computations yield a pure Lamb wave angle fingerprint, this is no longer valid for the more realistic case of a bounded beam. The experimental recordings are fully supported by the bounded beam simulations. To complement the traditional amplitude measurement, experimental and numerical investigations have been performed to record, predict and analyze the phase of the transmitted ultrasonic beam. This results in the conceptual introduction of the 'phase polar scan', exposing even more intriguing and detailed patterns. In fact, the combination of the amplitude and the phase polar scan provides the complete knowledge about the complex transmission coefficient for every possible angle of incidence. This comprehensive information will be very valuable for inverse modeling of the local elasticity tensor based on a single polar scan experiment. Finally, the polar scan method has been applied for the detection of an artificial delamination. Contrary to the pulsed UPS, the quasi-harmonic UPS (both the amplitude and phase recording) shows a superior sensitivity to the presence of the delamination.

The pulsed ultrasonic polar scan (P-UPS) technique provides a map with characteristic contours reflecting the critical bulk wave angles, which directly relate to the in-plane elastic properties of the insonified material spot. Besides these contours, additional information is captured in a P-UPS experiment which has particular importance for the inspection of anisotropic materials. By extensive post-processing on a single P-UPS experiment, we successfully extracted the local directional (i) critical bulk wave angles, (ii) phase velocity profiles, (iii) slowness curves, (iv) walk-off angles and (v) energy velocity profiles, for the three different polarization states of bulk waves. The procedure is demonstrated and discussed for an isotropic aluminum sample as well as an autoclave manufactured orthotropic [o](8) carbon/epoxy laminate. In addition, a numerical and experimental investigation of the role of the immersion liquid as a lens for the P-UPS result is performed. This lensing effect permits to zoom in/out on the P-UPS fingerprint, hence broadening the class of materials which can be inspected by the P-UPS technique. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The ultrasonic polar scan (UPS), either in transmission, reflection or backscatter mode, is a promising non-destructive testing technique for the characterization of composites, providing information about the mechanical anisotropy, the viscoelastic damping, the surface roughness, and more. At present, the technique is merely being used for qualitative purposes. The limited quantitative exploration and use of the technique can be primarily ascribed to limitations of current theoretical models as well as the difficulty to perform accurate, and more importantly, reproducible UPS experiments. Over the last years, we have identified several potential pitfalls in the experimental implementation of the technique which severely deteriorate the accurateness and reproducibility of a UPS. In this paper, we make an inventory of the most important difficulties, illustrate each of them by a real experiment and present a feasible mediation, either numerical or experimental in nature. Once the experimental set-up is fine-tuned to overcome these pitfalls, it is expected that the recording of high-level UPS experiments, in combination with numerical computations, will facilitate the technique to become a fully quantitative non-destructive characterization method. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.