In this example, Buzz-o-sonic was used to measure the Young's modulus of five preceramic-paper-derived Si-SiC composite pieces obtained from the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Tobias Fey is gratefully acknowledged for his support of this work and for supplying the samples. The main goal was to see if Buzz-o-sonic could be used to measure such small and delicate samples.

The test pieces were relatively small and very porous, making them difficult to measure by any other means than Buzz-o-sonic. Nevertheless, the elastic properties were easily obtained (table 1).

Table 1: Data for Fibrillious paper derived ceramics

The Poisson's ratios are essentially meaningless in this case, because the samples were very anisotropic. Nevertheless, an estimate of the Young's moduli of the samples could be obtained as shown in the table. Typically, the Young's modulus correlated with the bulk density figure 1.

Fig 1: Young's modulus Vs Bulk Density

The Young's modulus of sample 2 was shown to be higher than one would expect for its bulk density. However, the main finding is that small and delicate samples can be measured using the Buzz-o-sonic testing system.

Later work using Buzz-o-sonic was published in Adv. Mater. 19 4515–4519 (2007) by Hans Windsheimer, Nahum Travitzky, Andreas Hofenauer, and Peter Greil at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg