Development of Acoustical Specification for Hard Disk Drive Clicking Noise

Friday, February 22, 2008 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Quoc Nguyen Client Acoustical Engineering Dell, Inc. Austin Design Center Round Rock, Texas http://www.dell.com Recently Dell has seen a rise in noise complaints tied to HDDs, where the customer feedback indicates objection to a “clicking” sound.  Dell therefore wished to develop a specification to capture customer…

Techniques for Measuring the Acoustical Properties of Musical Instruments

Friday, February 15, 2008 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Alex Mayer The University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria http://www.bias.at/welcome_eng.htm An important area within the diverse field of musical acoustics is the objective evaluation of musical instruments using basic principles of physical acoustics.  For example, broadband measurement of the acoustic input impedance can provide…

Case Studies in Architectures for Noise Identification through Low Cost Microphone Arrays

Friday, February 1, 2008 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Kurt Veggeberg Business Development Manager, Sound and Vibration National Instruments Austin, Texas http://www.ni.com/soundandvibration Microphone phased arrays have been used for many years. For the most part, phased arrays have been used as a research tool to gain insight into noise sources and into the physical mechanisms…

Challenges in Automotive Audio and Infotainment

Friday, January 25, 2008 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Paul Shepherd Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin http://www.ece.utexas.edu Branded-audio suppliers are regularly challenged by automotive manufacturers to minimize cost. By creating and using intellectual property to overcome problems inherent with commodity audio systems, branded-audio suppliers are able to acquire…

The Search for Nonlinearity in High-Amplitude Noise from Military Jets

Friday, January 18, 2008 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Professor Anthony A. Atchley Graduate Program in Acoustics The Pennsylvania State University http://www.acs.psu.edu The Navy is confronted with complaints about noise from flight operations in the vicinity of military air bases. The proposed relocation of F/A-18 squadrons from Florida to Virginia in 1997 set off a…

Diffraction of Waves on Periodical Structures: Acoustic, Ultrasonic and Acousto-Optical Diffraction Phenomena

Monday, December 3, 2007 4:00 p.m. Professor Nico F. Declercq Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA http://www.me.gatech.edu and Georgia Tech Lorraine Laboratory for Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation Metz-Technopole, France http://www.georgiatech-metz.fr Diffraction effects, caused by the interaction of sound with periodical structures, occur in many fields of acoustics. In ultrasonics those effects are often used to…

Characteristics and Applications of Sonoluminescence Phenomena

Friday, November 16, 2007 4:00 p.m. Dr. Ho-Young Kwak Chung-Ang University Seoul, Korea http://www.cau.ac.kr/english Sonoluminescence (SL) is the light emission associated with the catastrophic collapse of a micro bubble oscillating in an ultrasonic field. However, the exact mechanism of the light emission, which is characterized by picosecond flashes of continuous spectrum, has not been identified.…

Imaging of Iron Oxide Nanocomposites Using Magneto-Motive Ultrasound

Friday, November 9, 2007 4:00 p.m. Mohammad Mehrmohammadi and Jung Hwan Oh Department of Biomedical Engineering The University of Texas at Austin http://www.bme.utexas.edu With the development of targeted ultrasound contrast agents including microbubbles, liposomes, and perfluorocarbon particles, the role of ultrasound in molecular and cellular imaging has been redefined. Generally, nanoscale particles are required to…

Case Studies in Architectural Acoustics and Noise Control

Friday, October 26, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 James Perry Cerami & Associates New York, New York http://www.ceramiassociates.com Cerami & Associates is a nationally recognized firm of acoustical and audiovisual consultants with a reputation for excellence. We consult with prestigious clients on a wide variety of project types ranging from small offices to multi-million…

Intravascular Photoacoustic Imaging

Friday, October 19, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Bo Wang Department of Biomedical Engineering The University of Texas at Austin http://www.bme.utexas.edu Intravascular photoacoustic (IVPA) imaging has the potential to characterize atherosclerosis based on the optical absorption differences of various tissue types. Combined intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) and IVPA imaging can visualize both the structure and…

Mathematical Models of Sand

Friday, October 12, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Professor Charles Radin Department of Mathematics The University of Texas at Austin http://www.ma.utexas.edu/dev/math/index.html Sand exhibits some unusual mechanical properties, for instance: dilatancy, the Janssen effect and random close packing. Attempts to develop a theory to explain such behavior usually begin with analyses of dense packings of…

Laser Vibrometry: An Introduction to Non-Contact Vibration Measurement

Friday, September 28, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Dr. Vikrant Palan Polytec Incorporated Tustin, CA http://www.polytec.com/usa/default.asp Laser Doppler vibrometry has come a long way since its conception in early 1970s. It is now widely used for non-contact and non-invasive vibration characterization of micro-, macroand meso-structures. Some of the applications where non-contact measurement methods become…

Acoustic Piezoelectric Transducers

Wednesday, September 19, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Dr. Fernando Garcia-Osuna Sugar Land Technology Center Schlumberger Corporation http://www.slb.com Acoustic piezoelectric transducers are widely used in the medical, oil, gas, automotive, audio, NDT, and underwater applications. This talk describes the basic and fundamental science of piezoelectric materials and transducers to generate and detect sound in…

Employing Engineering Design Constructs to Improve Acoustic Material Performance

Friday, September 14, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Dr. Mike Haberman Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin http://www.arlut.utexas.edu Recent research in the material sciences has focused an enormous effort on leveraging new technologies and computational power to create designer materials. The associated field of study, called materials design, is a science…

Penetrating Bubble Clouds Acoustically with Dolphin-like Signals

Friday, September 7, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Daniel Finfer Institute of Sound and Vibration Research University of Southampton Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom http://www.isvr.soton.ac.uk Man-made active sonar does not operate well in bubbly water. However some acoustically-active dolphins and porpoises are able to compete effectively in bubbly, shallow, coastal waters. Possible physics solutions to…

Acoustical and Ocular Human Effects Analysis of Flashbang Devices

Friday, April 27, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 James Parker General Dynamics San Antonio, Texas http://www.generaldynamics.com Flashbang devices are designed to startle, distract, and/or warn an individual or group of individuals through the use of a bright flash and loud bang. In order to quantitatively compare the effectiveness of various devices, the physical parameters…

The Parametric Acoustic Array

Friday, April 13, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Professor Mark F. Hamilton Applied Research Laboratories The University of Texas at Austin http://www.arlut.utexas.edu The parametric acoustic array has been the most intensively studied technological application of nonlinear acoustics. Its underlying physical principle is the nonlinear conversion of acoustic energy from high to low frequencies. Hallmarks…

Combined Ultrasound and Photoacoustic Imaging to Guide Photothermal Cancer Therapy

Friday, March 30, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Jignesh Shah Department of Biomedical Engineering The University of Texas at Austin http://www.bme.utexas.edu Photothermal therapy is a targeted, non-invasive alternative to surgery for cancer treatment. Photothermal therapy works on the principle of converting light energy to heat energy, causing localized tumor necrosis. However, in order to…

Micro-Ultrasound in the Land of Bioresearch

Friday, March 9, 2007 4:00 p.m. in ETC 4.120 Professor F. Stuart Foster Department of Medical Biophysics The University of Toronto http://medbio.utoronto.ca/faculty/foster.html Over the past few years biomedical applications of ultrasound have rapidly advanced. This is particularly evident in the development of high frequency micro-imaging of the mouse. The principles of this technology will be…