Sensitivity study of signal characteristics for an inverse waveguide based approach of material characterization

A very promising approach for the ultrasonic identification of highly damping viscoelastic polymers has been proposed by Rautenberg. He uses transmission measurements through hollow cylindrical shaped test samples which are modeled as waveguides. The measurement effect relies on multiple mode-conversions at the waveguide's outer and inner boundaries and is evaluated based on an inverse approach. In this contribution we discuss different signal characteristics of the obtained dispersed signals with respect to their sensitivity to certain material parameters. Based on these sensitivities we propose a multiphase optimization scheme to increase the optimization's convergence.