Time-resolved photoacoustic response of thin solids measured using minimal volume cell

The photoacoustic effect was explained more than half a century ago and has since been used to develop non-destructive and non-contact techniques for testing materials. Most existing experimental setups are time-consuming. In this paper, we deal with the development of time-resolved photoacoustics to use all the advantages of photoacoustic techniques in the development of real-time characterization of various samples. We propose a model for a time-resolved photoacoustic signal of thin samples measured in a gas-microphone setup with a minimal volume cell, assuming that the gas column in the cell can be shorter than the thermal diffusion length in air. The derived model additionally includes the influence of thermal relaxations and detector transfer function. We also suggest a methodology for inverse problem solving, i.e., to determine the sample properties from measured signals using the presented model. The model has been validated by comparing the model predictions with an experimentally measured signal for a thin metallic sample excited by an optical pulse train of a repetition rate of 12 Hz. The results obtained by the suggested inverse-problem solving methodology are in accordance with the literature, thus confirming the validity of the proposed methodology. We have shown that the proposed model and the methodology of inverse time-resolved photoacoustic problems give the same results as the widespread time-consuming frequency photoacoustic measurements. This means that the presented model and methodology enable the employment of low-frequency time-resolved gas-microphone photoacoustics in the real-time characterization of thin solids.