Nde Imaging with Multielement Arrays

An ultrasonic phased array system will be described. This is a digitally based system consisting of two 2.5 MHz, 32 element piezoelectric transducer arrays connected to a multiplexer. The multiplexer can select contiguous groups of 16 elements within either array as transmitters and/or receivers. The sixteen receiving elements are each connected to a separate A/D converter and buffer memory. The beam forming for the 16 received signals is done by an array processor which is capable of implementing a wide range of signal processing techniques associated with the synthesis of the beam. The output of the array processor can be stored on the disk memory of a mini-computer and post processing can be performed on the signals prior to displaying them on a color graphics display.