Determination of ultrasonic parameters based on attenuation and dispersion measurements.

In the measurement of acoustic attenuation that obeys a power-low alpha = beta f, the traditional through-transmission method uses only the amplitude information of the recorded pulses to determine the two parameters, beta and n. In this paper, we propose a new method that utilizes both the amplitude and phase information of the pulses to determine the two parameters. According to this method, the two parameters are estimated by simultaneously performing a least squares fit to the attenuation data that are derived from the amplitude spectra of the pulses, and to the dispersion data that are derived from the phase spectra of the pulses. By fully utilizing the information contained in the recorded pulses and imposing additional constraints on the two parameters, the estimation uncertainty can be reduced. Experimental results from two specimens, one having a linear attenuation and one having a nonlinear attenuation, demonstrate that the new method produces a moderate variance reduction in the case of linear attenuation, and a significant variance reduction in the case of nonlinear attenuation.