Simultaneous determination of wave velocity and thickness on overlapped signals using Forward Backward algorithm

This paper presents a method to simultaneously determine the wave velocity and the thickness of an unknown sample in case of overlapped ultrasonic signals. Indeed, the determination of the time delay in an ultrasonic signal can be critical to allow the simultaneous characterization of parameters of the studied material, such as the thickness and the wave velocity. Therefore, a forward-backward algorithm is applied to the overlapped signal using a reference signal in order to retrieve the excitation signal. Firstly, the method is explained and a validation on synthetic signal is performed to observe its robustness. Secondly, a time retrieval is performed on real signals to determine thickness and wave velocity in aluminium plates. The results show that this method is suitable to simultaneously retrieve thickness and wave velocity, even for overlapped signals (up to 65%), with a discrepancy as low as 1%.