Development of a Method for Characterizing Single-Fiber Composite Interphase from Frequency-Domain Characteristics of Ultrasonic Scattered Waves

A method is proposed to characterize single-fiber composite interphases from the frequency-domain characteristics of scattered ultrasonic waves, and its feasibility is investigated theoretically. It has been shown that the locations and magnitudes of the peaks and valleys in the frequency domain are affected significantly by the interphase properties, which may indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Although the frequency-domain behavior is basically associated with the resonance of the fiber-interphase system, it is not dominantly affected by the scatterer's resonance unlike that in the case of acoustic wave scattering. Therefore, the conventional acoustic resonant scattering theory is not directly applicable to the characterization of composite interphases. In order to solve the inverse problem of predicting the interphase properties from the frequency-domain characteristics of the ultrasonic scattered waves, an artificial neural network has been constructed. This approach has demonstrated reasonable accuracy in most cases considered in this study