Subsampling Approaches for Compressed Sensing with Ultrasound Arrays in Non-Destructive Testing.

Full Matrix Capture is a multi-channel data acquisition method which enables flexible, high resolution imaging using ultrasound arrays. However, the measurement time and data volume are increased considerably. Both of these costs can be circumvented via compressed sensing, which exploits prior knowledge of the underlying model and its sparsity to reduce the amount of data needed to produce a high resolution image. In order to design compression matrices that are physically realizable without sophisticated hardware constraints, structured subsampling patterns are designed and evaluated in this work. The design is based on the analysis of the Cramér-Rao Bound of a single scatterer in a homogeneous, isotropic medium. A numerical comparison of the point spread functions obtained with different compression matrices and the Fast Iterative Shrinkage/Thresholding Algorithm shows that the best performance is achieved when each transmit event can use a different subset of receiving elements and each receiving element uses a different section of the echo signal spectrum. Such a design has the advantage of outperforming other structured patterns to the extent that suboptimal selection matrices provide a good performance and can be efficiently computed with greedy approaches.

Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of Precipitate Strengthened High Entropy Alloy Al10Co25Cr8Fe15Ni36Ti6 with Additions of Hafnium and Molybdenum.

High entropy or compositionally complex alloys provide opportunities for optimization towards new high-temperature materials. Improvements in the equiatomic alloy Al17Co17Cr17Cu17Fe17Ni17 (at.%) led to the base alloy for this work with the chemical composition Al10Co25Cr8Fe15Ni36Ti6 (at.%). Characterization of the beneficial particle-strengthened microstructure by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and observation of good mechanical properties at elevated temperatures arose the need of accomplishing further optimization steps. For this purpose, the refractory metals hafnium and molybdenum were added in small amounts (0.5 and 1.0 at.% respectively) because of their well-known positive effects on mechanical properties of Ni-based superalloys. By correlation of microstructural examinations using SEM with tensile tests in the temperature range of room temperature up to 900 °C, conclusions could be drawn for further optimization steps.