A single procedure to measure ultrasound characteristic wave impedance, attenuation and propagation velocity in materials

A simple experimental procedure which can be used to measure the ultrasound characteristic wave impedance, attenuation and velocity propagation in materials is described. The method is based only on the measurement of reflection coefficient vs frequency for a slab-form sample of the material under test. Interesting features are that there are no particular requirements for the sample sizes and that only commercially available instrumentation is used. A first experimental implementation of the technique using a vector network analyser is reported. The results obtained confirm the performance estimated theoretically. © 1993.