Nico F. Declercq is professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in Atlanta GA, USA, with primary duties at the Georgia Tech Lorraine Campus in Metz, France, at a joint International research laboratory between the French CNRS and Georgia Tech (UMI Georgia Tech – CNRS 2958). He was born in Belgium where he obtained a Masters degree in Physics (astrophysics) from the Catholic University of Leuven and a PhD degree in Engineering Physics from Ghent University.

Declercq has been awarded a number of awards including the prestigious ICA Early Career Award in 2007 and the International Dennis Gabor Award in 2006. He authored over 50 peer-reviewed papers in international journals and made over a 140 congress presentations of which several as plenary or invited speaker.

Website: http://www.me.gatech.edu/declercq/
 

Abstract

Ultrasonic NDT of a corrugated material: Pandora's box and a journey through ultrasonics

Our eyes and ears nourish our sense of existence. They are open windows on the world and inspire our brains and our mind. Through these windows thoughts between people are exchanged, questions raised by the world around us are posed, natural cycles evoking time are revealed. Technical sciences such as ultrasonics are extensions of our primary senses and deepen questions and answers, problems and solutions and therefore our sense of existence and our ability to understand, to invent, to fabricate and to check quality and safety. Many topics in ultrasonics involve solutions that can only be obtained through long journeys along different topics, different phenomena and different partial problems. One of such topics is the interaction of ultrasound with periodic structures. Periodic structures are used in many applications in science and engineering, such as phononic crystals, nano-materials, reinforced materials, composites, pyramids, theatres, and noise barriers.

A journey will be presented necessary to understand the interaction of sound with a specific kind of periodic structure, namely a corrugated material. The journey will bring us to guided waves in plates and on surfaces, to simulation models, to anisotropic media, to Bragg scattering, to nonlinear acoustic effects and will even point at connections between modern science and ancient Hellenistic and Mayan architecture. The journey will challenge our sense of time, our sense of scale and will allow us to appreciate the current state of the art in a number of areas in ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation of materials.