Abstract
Composite wood materials are very sensitive to water and inspection without any coupling medium of a liquid is really needed to wood materials due to the permeation of coupling medium such as water. However, air-coupled ultrasound has obvious advantages over water-coupled experimentation compared with conventional C-scanner. In this work, it is desirable to perform contact-less nondestructive evaluation to assess wood material homogeneity. A wood material was nondestructively characterized with non-contact and contact modes to measure ultrasonic velocity using automated data acquisition software. We have utilized a proposed peak-delay measurement method. Also through transmission mode was performed because of the main limitation for air-coupled transducers, which is the acoustic impedance mismatch between most materials and air. The variation of ultrasonic velocity was found to be somewhat difference due to air-coupled limitations over conventional scan images. However, conventional C-scan images are well agreed with increasing the resin-infiltrated time as expected. Finally, we have developed a measurement system of an ultrasonic velocity based on data acquisition software for obtaining ultrasonic quantitative data for correlation with C-scan images.