Separation of Damping and Velocity Strain Dependencies using an Ultrasonic Monochromatic Excitation

Separating the contributions of modulus and damping to elastic nonlinearity is important for understanding the physics behind observations, for applications in ultrasonic imaging and nonlinear nondestructive testing, and more generally for the characterization of materials. This study offers an experimental approach which, besides being simple to implement, allows one to separate nonlinearities in velocity and attenuation from a single monochromatic signal. The proposed method should enable monitoring of the very early stages of slow nonlinear dynamical phenomena, such as conditioning or relaxation, which is difficult with other experimental techniques.