An efficient simulation scheme for testing materials in a nondestructive manner

Nondestructive testing (NDT) of materials and systems is becoming more and more important these days due to the progress in the enabling technologies used in such tests and the nature of materials and systems that should be tested without any kind of disturbance or damage. Detecting defects in materials is an important process in the quality control process of engineering systems. NDT can be applied to many systems in many disciplines including civil engineering, architectural engineering, material engineering and science, city planning, physics, mechanical engineering, and aeronautical engineering. Enabling technologies such as modeling and simulation, pattern recognition, neural networks, fast Fourier transform, Wigner distribution, genetic algorithms, fuzzy set theory, and wavelet transforms are some of the recent technologies that are being applied to this problem. In this paper, we present a simulation-based methodology using neural networks to characterize ultrasonic transducers.