About
Emeritus Professor Victor Humphrey is Professor of Acoustics within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton.
Victor Humphrey joined the Institute of Sound and Vibration in February 2004 as Professor of Acoustics. He graduated in Physics from the University of Bristol in 1975 and then obtained a PhD in Physics, also from the University of Bristol, in 1981. He then joined the University of Bath as a Research Officer in the Department of Physics and was subsequently appointed to Lecturer and Senior Lecturer posts. He was awarded the Institute of Acoustics A.B. Wood Medal in 1988 and the University of Bath Mary Tasker Award for excellence in teaching in 1996. In 2002/3 he spent a period on sabbatical leave at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington and at the Defence Research and Development Canada research laboratories in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is a fellow the Institute of Acoustics and a member of the Institute of Physics and Acoustical Society of America. He has recently joined the British Standards Institution Committee EPL/87 responsible for Standards in Ultrasonics and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Measurement Advisory Committee (MAC) Working Group on Acoustics.
Research
Research interests
- Professor Humphrey has particular research interests in the areas of medical ultrasound and underwater acoustics. Common themes running through his research include the understanding and application of non-linear acoustics and the laboratory measurement of physical acoustic phenomena including scattering. His main research interests include: · Nonlinear propagation, streaming and imaging in medical ultrasonics; · Ultrasonic heating and propagation in biological media; · Parametric arrays and their application to acoustic measurements in the laboratory; · Acoustic transmission and reflection properties of isotropic and anisotropic materials; · Scattering from objects and methods of measuring and predicting the scattered field for regular and irregular bodies; · Numerical modelling of transducers and fields.
Current research
3D gel dosimetry in radiotherapy using ultrasonic methods
Detection and identification of difficult maritime targets
Locally resonant sonic materials
Measurement of materials under ocean conditions
Measurement of scapular (shoulder blade) movements (kinematics)
Medical ultrasound exposure estimation in finite-amplitude beams
Near field calibration techniques for large transducers
Noise from ducted underwater turbines
Nonlinear sources in air
Optical measurement of high amplitude medical ultrasound fields
Real time sonographic characteristics of the abdominal and pelvic floor muscles in subjects with sacroiliac dysfunction during respiratory, postural and voluntary manoeuvres
The measurement of Pelvic Floor Muscle (PFM) function in women using 2D dynamic ultrasound
Underwater noise of dredging vessels during aggregate extraction operations
Corrosion detection in small diameter buried steel gas pipes
The aim of this work is to investigate the feasibility of torsional guided waves to inspect buried pipes with small diameters. MATLAB scripts have been produced to find the phase and group velocity dispersion curves for lossless plates and pipes of varying sizes and thicknesses. Upon finding the theoretical guided wave characteristics, real world analyses are conducted to determine whether the aim could be achieved in an experimental setup.