The International Congress on Ultrasonics'2011 held in Gda?sk, Poland was the third one (after Viena'2007, Austria and Santiago'2009, Chile) over the world meeting of the ultrasonics community, continuing a long tradition of Ultrasonics International Conferences (organized every second year since 1963 to 2005), as well as World Congresses on Ultrasonics (organized every second year since 1995 to 2005). Last 6 years experience of foundation of ICU congresses have shown a real progress in global integration process of the ultrasonics community and provided an excellent platform for the professional knowledge, exchange among scientists and engineers from academic and industrial centers as well as from other institutions and places of ultrasonics studies and applications.
Ultrasonics as multi-disciplinary field covers a great number of topics from fundamental physical aspects through chemical, biological, medical, material inspections and others branches to many applications. All contributions of topics of the field of ultrasonics were presented during the ICU'2011 in Gdańsk, and the meeting provided a valuable and unique opportunity for participants to exchange their achievements and experience as well as to enlarge their international contacts on the field.
Experimental modal analysis of a violin with three different tensions of a bass bar has been performed. The bass bar tension is the only intentionally introduced modification of the instrument. The aim of the study was to find differences and similarities between top plate modal parameters determined by a bass bar perfectly fitting the shape of the top plate, the bass bar with a tension usually applied by luthiers (normal), and the tension higher than the normal value. In the modal analysis four signature modes are taken into account. Bass bar tension does not change the sequence of mode shapes. Changes in modal damping are insignificant. An increase in bass bar tension causes an increase in modal frequencies A0 and B(1+) and does not change the frequencies of modes CBR and B(1-).
It has been shown in the present paper that exploitation of the experimental potential of a photoacoustic technique can provide information on a type of intermolecular interactions in aqueous mixtures containing organic liquids, when the basic parameters of these mixtures, such as density, ρ, specific heat, cp, or thermal conductivity, λ, are unknown. Earlier investigations of concentration dependence of effusivity in different aqueous solutions of organic liquids demonstrated that the photoacoustics method is a sensitive tool to identify hydrophobic properties of such liquids. In our experiment this suggestion was exploited for a solution of methanol which is known to display much weaker hydrophobicity than other alcohols.
It was confirmed that the location of extreme deviations from linearity for the thermal effusivity, Δe, agrees well with that of characteristic points for the isentropic compressibility coefficient, κS, and the excess molar volume, V_m^E, as a function of the concentration.