Air-coupled ultrasound detection of natural defects in wood using ferroelectret and piezoelectric sensors

Abstract

Air-coupled ultrasound was used for assessing natural defects in wood boards by through-transmission scanning measurements. Gas matrix piezoelectric (GMP) and ferroelectret (FE) transducers were studied. The study also included tests with additional bias voltage with the ferroelectret receivers. Signal analyses, analyses of the measurement dynamics and statistical analyses of the signal parameters were conducted. After the measurement series, the samples were cut from the measurement regions and the defects were analyzed visually from the cross sections. The ultrasound responses were compared with the results of the visual examination of the cross sections. With the additional bias voltage, the ferroelectret measurement showed increased signal-to-noise ratio, which is especially important for air-coupled measurement of high-attenuation materials like wood. When comparing the defect response of GMP and FE sensors, it was found that FE sensors had more sensitive dynamic range, resulting from better s/n ratio and short response pulse. Classification test was made to test the possibility of detecting defects in sound wood. Machine learning methods including decision trees, k-nearest neighbor and support vector machine were used. The classification accuracy varied between 72 and 77% in the tests. All the tested machine learning methods could be used efficiently for the classification.