Waveguide for air-coupled ultrasonic phased-arrays with propagation time compensation and plug-in assembly.

Waveguides allow grating lobe free beamforming for air-coupled ultrasonic phased-arrays by reducing the effective inter-element spacing to half wavelength. Since the sound waves propagate through the waveguide ducts, additional time delays are introduced. In this work, we present analytical, numerical, and experimental methods to estimate these time delays. Afterwards, two different waveguides are compared. The first one consists of equal-length ducts, requiring a time-consuming assembly process of the ultrasonic phased-array. In contrast, the second waveguide consists of Bézier-shaped ducts of unequal lengths but a planar input port allowing fast assembly. The analytical model is based on the geometric lengths of the waveguide ducts. The numerical model relies on a transient finite element analysis. All simulations are validated in an anechoic chamber using a calibrated microphone. The analytical (7.6% deviation) and numerical (3.2% deviation) propagation time models are in good agreement with the measurements. By using the analyzed propagation times for the compensation of the unequal waveguide duct lengths, we restored the beamforming capability without significant sound pressure level (SPL) loss. This work shows the possibility of reduced transducer assembly time for waveguided air-coupled phased-arrays without a reduced SPL.

Real-Time 3-D Imaging Using an Air-Coupled Ultrasonic Phased-Array.

We present an air-coupled ultrasonic imaging system based on a 40-kHz 8×8 phased-array for 3-D real-time localization of multiple objects in the far-field. By attaching a waveguide to the array, the effective interelement spacing is reduced to half wavelength. This enables grating lobe-free transmit and receive beamforming with a uniform rectangular array of efficient low-cost transducers. The system further includes custom transceiver electronics, an field programmable gate array (FPGA) system-on-chip and a PC for GPU accelerated frequency domain signal processing, consisting of matched filtering, conventional beamforming, and envelope extraction using Nvidia Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) and OpenGL for visualization. The uniform rectangular layout allows utilizing multiple transmit and receive methods, known from medical imaging applications. Thus, the system is dynamically adaptable to maximize the frame rate or detection range. One implemented method demonstrates the real-time capability by transmitting a hemispherical pulse (HP) with a single transducer to irradiate the surroundings simultaneously, whereas all transducers are used for echo reception. The imaging properties, such as axial and lateral resolution, field of view and range of view, are characterized in an anechoic chamber. The object localization is validated for a horizontal and vertical field of view of ±80° and a range of view of 0.5-3 m with 29 frames/s. Using the same system, a comparison between the HP method and the dynamic transmit beamforming method, which transmits multiple sequential beamformed pulses for long-range localization, is provided.