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BTech 451 : Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy

This project is involved with the development of Resonant Ultrasound Spectroscopy (RUS) and contains tools used in performing resonant ultrasound spectroscopy on rocks and other materials. All programming work is based on C and Python programming language.

Resonant ultrasound spectroscopy is a laboratory technique that use in material science for measuring fundamental material properties involving elasticity. This technique works in the fact that for every solid object has natural frequencies at which they vibrate. The natural frequency depends on the elasticity, the size and the shape of the object. RUS exploits this property of solids to determine the elastic tensor of the material. The great advantage of this technique is that the entire elastic properties is obtained from an object sample in a single rapid measurement.

The most common method for detecting the mechanical resonant spectrum is illustrated in Fig. 1, where a small parallelepiped – shaped sample is lightly held between two piezoelectric transducers. One transducer is known as “Driver transducer”, its function is used to generate an elastic wave of constant amplitude and varying frequency, whereas the other transducer is known as “Pickup transducer” is used to detect the sample’s resonance. The output would be a range of frequencies but what is recorded is a sequence of resonance peaks. This technique works because of the fact that solid objects have natural frequencies at which they vibrate. When the generated varying frequencies are passed through the object, resonance peaks occur due to the fact that the frequencies that were sent through the solid object correspond to its natural frequency.