Universality of Nonclassical Nonlinearity

This book presents the results of two major international research projects on phenomenology, theory and applications of Nonclassical Nonlinearity. It conveys concepts, experimental techniques and applications which were previously found in specialized journals. It also allows for an interdisciplinary audience to better understand the range of practical applications, and is timely and interesting to both researchers and professionals.This book comes as a result of the research work developed in the framework of two international projects: the European Science Foundation supported program NATEMIS (Nonlinear Acoustic Techniques for Micro-Scale Damage Diagnostics) and a Los Alamos-based international network. The main topics of both the programs and the book cover the phenomenology, theory and applications of Nonclassical Nonlinearity (NCNL). NCNL techniques have been found in recent years to be extremely powerful (up to 1000 times more than the corresponding linear techniques) in a wide range of applications, including Material Characterization, Ultrasonics, Geophysics and Maintenance and Restoration of artifacts. These techniques are being adopted as the main inspection and research tool in another European program: AERONEWS (Health monitoring of aircraft by nonlinear elastic wave propagation). In the future, the proposed Universality of NCNL is expected to extend the range of applications to numerous other fields and scientific disciplines outside acoustics and NDE.