In many application areas great interest exists for identifying the mechanical properties of materials in a nondestructive way. A method that can be used to identify these materials is the so-called polar scanning method. In this method the energy absorbed in the material from an incident ultrasonic sound wave under oblique incidence is measured for different incident angles. In this project the polar scanning method is re-examined so that the extraction of material parameters in orthotropic and heterogeneous materials becomes possible in each material point. The entire technique is also revisited for calculation efficiency reasons. To this end, the project will realize the following achievements:• a 3D finite element method for modeling the propagation of ultrasonic waves in orthotropic and heterogeneous materials will be developed
1) a three-dimensional measurement procedure will be investigated to measure ultrasonic sound waves using optical techniques.
2) based on the measurements and the finite element models an identification technique to ident ify unknown
material parameters will be constructed based on an evolutionary optimization algorithm
3) the material identification method is applied to several composite materials (with or without damage).