RESUMEN
This paper provides design and development details of the generation of bipolar High Voltage (HV) square wave pulses for the excitation of low frequency ultrasonic transducers. Such a circuit is required for the purpose of ultrasonic inspection of components, particularly where high energy is required to insonify the attenuative medium, such as concrete. A HV (±350 V) square wave pulse has been generated by an ultrafast complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) pair, which is driven by high speed MOSFET drivers. The generated bipolar square wave pulse has been utilized to energize a 108 kHz ultrasonic transducer to operate in the pulse-echo mode for the evaluation of a concrete test block. The receiver amplifier filters the received low-amplitude echo signals, which are reflected back from a discontinuity, and amplifies further for signal to noise ratio enhancement. The pulser board designed has been tested and evaluated for its functionality to measure ultrasonic velocity in the highly attenuative concrete medium up to a depth of 1 m. The measured value of acoustic velocity was compared with the value obtained from the commercially available ultrasonic pulse velocity instrument, and the values obtained are within ±5%.
RESUMEN
The novel circular-array based real-time ultrasonic imaging technique using an ultrasonic camera has been proposed in this paper for imaging of a fuel sub-assembly (FSA) of a fast breeder reactor. The developed ultrasonic camera-based system provides real-time images of the top-head region of the FSA in a high-temperature environment. For the circular-array based ultrasonic imaging, the entire circular-array has been divided into the various arcs, and the address-based analog multiplexing scheme has been proposed in such a way that all channels of the specific arc are selected concurrently (transducer excitation, data acquisition, and data processing and transferring). Various data processing algorithms are proposed and implemented for multi-channel ultrasonic data processing in real-time. For the experimentation, the complete 18-channel ultrasonic camera system has been designed, developed, and evaluated in the laboratory. The performance evaluation of the developed circular-array based ultrasonic camera has been shown by acquiring the real-time images of the water-immersed dummy FSA in elevated temperature. Furthermore, both qualitative visualization and quantitative measurements of growth and bowing of the FSA top-head are presented.
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The paper proposed a novel hardware (FPGA) implementation of the coherent averaging architecture for the reconfigurable ultrasonic NDT system. The proposed hardware architecture uses the addressing based shifting technique for the addition operation and Radix-2 non-restoring algorithm for the division operation. Since the amount of hardware required by the proposed averaging scheme is independent of the number of averages, it supports on-the-fly control on the number of averages. Compared to conventional architecture, it provides 96% reduction in memory storage, 98% reduction in the number of adders, and 32% reduction in the processing time for the case of 64 coherent averages. For the experimentation, the ultrasonic imaging system designed and developed by the authors has been utilized. The developed system further supports dynamic on-line reconfiguration of the analog front-end hardware, real-time data acquisition, real-time hardware based data processing, and data transfer operations. The performance of implemented coherent averaging has been presented by various applications such as removal of RF random false-echoes, smoothing of A-scan waveforms and speckle removal of B-scan images.
RESUMEN
A real time empirical mode decomposition (EMD) algorithm based ultrasonic imaging system has been developed for non-destructive testing (NDT) applications. It is difficult to implement the EMD based signal processing algorithm in real time because it is totally a data-driven process which comprises numerous sifting operations. In this paper, the EMD algorithm has been implemented in the visual software environment. The EMD implementation encompasses two types of interpolation methods: piecewise linear interpolation (PLI) and cubic spline interpolation (CSI). The cubic spline tridiagonal matrix has been solved by using the Thomas algorithm for real time processing. The total time complexity functions for both the implemented PLI and CSI based EMD methods have been computed. For the signal filtering, the partial reconstruction algorithm has been adopted. The baseline correction and noise filtering applications have been presented using an EMD based visual software. The real time practicability and the efficiency of this method have been validated through ultrasonic NDT experimentation for improvement in the time domain resolution of the ultrasonic A-scan raw data. The practical results show that in the noisy environment, it is possible to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio for the visualization and identification of ultrasonic pulse-echo signals in real time.