6. Future prospects

Several hundred commercial instruments are in successful use worldwide, most of them in the field of quality control. However, most of them are dedicated to a single application. Unambiguously identifying the origin of observed phenomena is a complex task, which explains why acoustic microscopy is used more for imaging damage monitoring than for quantitative characterization.

Today, the work of acousticians consists in designing ever more flexible and high-performance instruments, in response to the demands of the industrial world, which legitimately wishes to benefit from the latest advances in terms of resolution, and requires ever-smaller manufacturing tolerances (in response to European standards in particular).

For highly absorbent media, where resolution and penetration are required on the one hand, and in the submicron range, which...