High speed air-coupled ultrasonic multichannel system

A modular air-coupled ultrasonic multichannel system is presented. The system is aimed for non-contact evaluation of (mainly) flat materials during or after the industrial production process. It is able to detect a large variety of internal quality errors such as density variations in non-wovens, delaminations in composite plates, bad bondings in laminates or artefacts in plastics or metal plates. The system is suitable for in-line quality control and to that purpose a fast FPGA based platform with parallel processing of a large number of data streams is implemented in the modules of the system. In spite of the fact that all measurements are performed in ambient air, the operational ultrasonic frequency is rather high (1 MHz), but lower frequencies are also possible. At low ultrasonic frequencies, the system can also be used as an air-coupled phased array.

ISBN:9788361402282

Publication year:2014