Abstract
This paper presents a 3D numerical simulation for air-coupled ultrasonic testing. Air-coupled ultrasonic testing has some advantages because this method is one of non-contact ultrasonic NDE methods. However, the positioning of air-coupled transducers is very sensitive, because the difference of acoustic impedance between air and solid is very large. In order to use this method for evaluation of various materials, it needs to simulate wave propagation in a solid medium. A BEM (boundary element method) is an effective method for wave propagation problems. Therefore, the BEM formulation using the CQM (convolution quadrature method) is developed for air-coupled ultrasonic testing and the numerical results for 3D wave simulation are shown.
