Acousto-ultrasonic (AU) interrogation is a single-sided nondestructive evaluation technique employing separated sending and receiving transducers. It is used for assessing the microstructural condition/distributed damage state of the material between the transducers. AU is complementary to more traditional NDE methods such as ultrasonic c-scan, x-ray radiography, and themographic inspection that tend to be used primarily for discrete flaw detection. Through its history, AU has been used to inspect polymer matrix composite, metal matrix composite, ceramic matrix composite, and even monolithic metallic materials. The development of a high-performance automated AU scan system for characterizing within-sample microstructural and property homogeneity is currently in a prototype stage at NASA. In this paper, a review of essential AU technology is given. Additionally, the basic hardware and software configuration, and preliminary results with the system, are described.
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