Ultrasonic camera: a matrix-based real-time ultrasonic imaging system for immersion applications

The novel matrix-based real-time ultrasonic imaging using an ultrasonic camera for immersion application has been proposed in this paper. The proposed ultrasonic camera provides real-time images of mechanical components and the image size is equal to the field of view of the developed matrix-based transducer assembly. For the matrix-based ultrasonic imaging, the addressing-based analog multiplexing scheme has been proposed in such a way that all channels of the specific row are selected simultaneously such as the transducer excitation, data acquisition, data processing and transferring operations are performed concurrently. Similarly, the same operations are performed for remaining all rows sequentially. The developed ultrasonic camera further supports dynamic on-line reconfiguration of the analog front-end hardware, real-time hardware/software-based data processing and data transfer operation. For the experimentation, the entire matrix-based (5 × 5) ultrasonic imaging system for immersion applications has been designed, developed and evaluated in the laboratory. Here we present the performance evaluation of the developed matrix-based ultrasonic camera system by acquiring the real-time images of the water-immersed mechanical objects.