Wide-angle transducers for real-time ultrasonic process tomography imaging applications

Abstract This paper describes the design of wide-angle transducers for a real-time ultrasonic tomography system for objects in a liquid. The system employs reflection mode tomography to generate images of the objects. The effect of the emission angle of the transducer on the quality of the reconstructed image is investigated and transducers with wide emission angles have been constructed for this work. A transducer ring with a diameter of 100 mm and using 36 elements has been successfully developed for this project. The system uses a digital signal processor for the data acquisition and a network of parallel processors for the real-time image reconstruction. A description of the overall system is given and results captured in real-time using test objects are shown in the form of images with a 100 × 100 pixel resolution. Reconstructed images have been obtained with speeds of up to 55 frames per second.