BaTiO₃ (BTO) ceramics were fabricated based on stereolithography technology. The microstructures and electric properties of the BTO ceramics were studied. X-ray patterns of sintered BTO ceramics indicated that the tetragonal phase had formed, and the grain size increased clearly as BTO weight percentage increased. Moreover, the BTO ceramics exhibited good electric properties, with a piezoelectric constant d₃₃ of 166 pC/N at 80% BTO weight percentage. To evaluate the properties of 3D printed BTO ceramics, a 1.4 MHz focused ultrasonic array was fabricated and characterized. The −6dB bandwidth of the array was 40%, and the insertion loss at the center frequency was 50 dB. The results show that the printed BTO ceramics array have good potential to be used in ultrasonic transducers for various applications.

Ultrasonic is one of the well-known methods for surface roughness measurement, but small roughness will only lead to a subtle variation of transmission or reflection. To explore sensitive techniques for surfaces with small roughness, nonlinear ultrasonic measurement in through-transmission and pulse-echo modes was proposed and studied based on an effective unit-cell finite element (FE) model. Higher harmonic generation in solids was realized by applying the Murnaghan hyperelastic material model. This FE model was verified by comparing the absolute value of the nonlinearity parameter with the analytical solution. Then, random surfaces with different roughness values ranging from 0 μm to 200 μm were repeatedly generated and studied in the two modes. The through-transmission mode is very suitable to measure the surfaces with roughness as small as 3% of the wavelength. The pulse-echo mode is sensitive and effective to measure the surface roughness ranging from 0.78% to 5.47% of the wavelength. This study offers a potential nondestructive testing and monitoring method for the interfaces or inner surfaces of the in-service structures.

Ultrasonic methods have been extensively developed in nondestructive testing for various materials and components. However, accurately extracting quantitative information about defects still remains challenging, especially for complex structures. Although the immersion technique is commonly used for complex-shaped parts, the large mismatch of acoustic impedance between water and metal prevents effective ultrasonic transmission and leads to a low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR). In this paper, a quantitative imaging method is proposed for complex-shaped parts based on an ice-coupled full waveform inversion (FWI) method. Numerical experiments were carried out to quantitatively inspect the various defects in a turbine blade. Firstly, the k-space pseudospectral method was applied to simulate ice-coupled ultrasonic testing for the turbine blade. The recorded full wavefields were then applied for a frequency-domain FWI based on the Limited-memory Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (L-BFGS) method. With a carefully selected iterative number and frequency, a successive-frequency FWI can well detect half wavelength defects. Extended studies on an open notch with different orientations and multiple adjacent defects proved its capability to detect different types of defects. Finally, an uncertainty analysis was conducted with inaccurate initial velocity models with a relative error of ±2%, demonstrating its robustness even with a certain inaccuracy. This study demonstrates that the proposed method has a high potential to inspect complex-shaped structures with an excellent resolution.

A decrease of piezoelectric properties in the fabrication of ultra-small Pb(Mg_1/3Nb_2/3)–x%PbTiO3 (PMN–x%PT) for high-frequency (>20 MHz) ultrasonic array transducers remains an urgent problem. Here, PMN–31%PT with micron-sized kerfs and high piezoelectric performance was micromachined using a 355 nm laser. We studied the kerf profile as a function of laser parameters, revealing that micron-sized kerfs with designated profiles and fewer micro-cracks can be obtained by optimizing the laser parameters. The domain morphology of micromachined PMN–31%PT was thoroughly analyzed to validate the superior piezoelectric performance maintained near the kerfs. A high piezoresponse of the samples after micromachining was also successfully demonstrated by determining the effective piezoelectric coefficient (d₃₃*~1200 pm/V). Our results are promising for fabricating superior PMN–31%PT and other piezoelectric high-frequency (>20 MHz) ultrasonic array transducers.