【Title】Research on sound velocity measurement in a laboratory for large elastic materials (2014 No.2) 

【Author】ZHU Hanhao; PIAO Shengchun; ZHANG Haigang; LIU Wei; AN Xudong 

【Abstract】 A measurement scheme carried out in a tank is designed to obtain the compressional and shear-wave velocities of a large elastic material. A hydrophone is used to receive the high frequency acoustic signals which penetrate the tested material, in order to determine the transmission time from the source to the hydrophone, the transmission time is also calculated according to the ray acoustic theory in layered media. A cost function is built based on the measured and the calculated transmission time, then the compressional- and shear-wave velocities can be obtained using the optimization algorithm. Compared with the traditional measurement scheme, this approach can not only get the 2 kinds of sound velocities in the tested material at the same time, but also keep the integrality of the tested material. With the proposed measurement system, the uncertainty of measurement results is less than 3.5%.