Preliminary Study of Using Acoustic Signal for Material Identification for Underwater Application

Structural inspection is a process to evaluate the condition of a structure in order to determine whether cracks, flaws defects or damages occur in structural build. This work explores using acoustic signal as a sensing modality to investigate for material identification in underwater application. Using the measured reflected signal, a reflection coefficient for different material types is calculated and compared to that of an ideal or standard case. Various materials with different density and surface reflection properties were used as test objects with respect to the optimum operating frequency in this work. Early results indicate that there is potential for further exploration.