The application of scanning acoustic microscopy to dielectric polymer composite material study

Acoustic microscopy is an effective method for visualization and quantitative analysis of physico-mechanical properties and microstructure of dielectric polymer blends and polymer composites. It allows one to use this method for investigating a wide variety of opaque materials and obtaining information about their inner structure as well as for optically transparent materials in which the contrast between different structures is practically absent. The methods of acoustic microscopy turns out to be very sensitive to any kind of inhomogeneties as well as various bulk defects: microcracks, pours, adhesion disturbance, exfoliation, inclusions, deviations from the given thickness off the layer in multilayered system and coating, technological deviations of sizes, orientation and grain distribution. In this work, the authors present experimental results investigation of two groups of objects. First is, polyethylene-polystyrene mixture films produced by different methods, where acoustic images clearly reveal the internal distribution of phases for each technological process. The second group is a multilayer dielectric structure, formed by different kinds of polymer, such as high density polyethylene, polyamide or ethylene vinyl alcohol, etc. In this case methods were used for nondestructive measurement of the thickness of multilayer polymer composite and adhesive layer and defect inspection