Plane wave imaging for ultrasonic inspection of irregular structures with high frame rates

Jeune, Léonard Le; Robert, Sébastien; Prada, Claire

doi:10.1063/1.4940456

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…When the radius of the front surface curvature is small, the assumption that a transmitted into the couplant plane wave remains planar after refraction through the interface is no longer appropriate. An alternative approach is to apply transmit delays onto the elements to produce a plane wave inside the specimen [34]. The idea is illustrated in Fig.…”

Section: B Pwi Adapted In Transmission (Pwat)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The work presented in [32] investigates the PWI performance in immersion scenarios as well as imaging in different modalities. An extension to this work is presented in [34], which addresses PWI through complex surfaces. The authors apply appropriate time delays to the array elements in order to produce a plane wave inside the component rather than in the couplant.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper proposes an alternative PWI approach which does not require prior knowledge of the inspection configuration, but forms images of comparable sensitivity to the ones produced by the technique in [34]. In the proposed approach, a plane wave is transmitted inside the couplant, without accounting for the front surface geometry.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Plane Wave Imaging Techniques for Immersion Testing of Components With Nonplanar Surfaces

Rachev

Wilcox

Velichko

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr.

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Plane Wave Imaging (PWI) is an ultrasonic array imaging technique used in non-destructive testing, that has been shown to yield high resolution with few transmissions. Only a few published examples are available of PWI of components with nonplanar surfaces in immersion. In these cases, inspections were performed by adapting the transmission delays in order to produce a plane wave inside the component. This adaptation requires prior knowledge of the component geometry and position relative to the array. The current paper proposes a new implementation, termed PWI Adapted in Post-Processing (PWAPP), which has no such requirement. In PWAPP the array emits a plane wave as in conventional PWI. The captured data is input into two post-processing stages. The first reconstructs the surface of the component, the latter images inside of it by adapting the delays to the distortion of the plane waves upon refraction at the reconstructed surface. Simulation and experimental data are produced from an immersed sample with a concave front surface and artificial defects. These are processed with conventional and surface corrected PWI. Both algorithms involving surface adaptation produced nearly equivalent results from the simulated data, and both outperform the non-adapted one. Experimentally, all defects are imaged with Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of at least 31.8 and 33.5 dB for respectively PWAPP and PWI adapted in transmission, but only 20.5 dB for conventional PWI. In the cases considered, reducing the number of transmissions below the number of array elements shows PWAPP maintains its high SNR performance down to number of firings equivalent to a quarter of the array elements. Finally, experimental data from a more complex surface specimen is processed with PWAPP resulting in detection of all scatterers and producing SNR comparable to that of the Total Focusing Method. Index Terms-ultrasound, non-destructive evaluation, plane wave imaging, immersion testing, signal processing, complex geometry.Rosen K. Rachev was born in Burgas, Bulgaria, in 1993. He received the M.Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Bristol, Bristol, U.K., in 2016. He is currently pursuing the D.Eng. degree in Nondestructive Evaluation in the Ultrasonics and Nondestructive Testing Research Group, University of Bristol. He is working on advanced ultrasonic data processing algorithms for pipeline in-line inspections, and his project is sponsored by Baker Hughes. His research interests include nondestructive evaluation for the oil and gas industry, ultrasonic phased array surface reconstruction, adaptive imaging, and defect characterisation.

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Section: B Pwi Adapted In Transmission (Pwat)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Plane Wave Imaging Techniques for Immersion Testing of Components With Nonplanar Surfaces

Rachev

Wilcox

Velichko

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. Ultrason., Ferroelect., Freq. Contr.

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“…This acquisition mode is called Full Matrix Capture (FMC). Another method that requires less transmissions is the Plane Wave Imaging (PWI) [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 ], achieving higher image rates. In this method, each transmission uses all array elements to produce a plane wave in a specified direction.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Plane Wave Imaging through Interfaces

Cosarinsky

Fernandez-Cruza

Camacho

2021

Sensors

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Plane Wave Imaging (PWI) has been recently proposed for fast ultrasound inspections in the Non-Destructive-Testing (NDT) field. By using a single (or a reduced number) of plane wave emissions and parallel beamforming in reception, frame rates of hundreds to thousands of images per second can be achieved without significant image quality losses with regard to the Total Focusing Method (TFM) or Phased Array (PA). This work addresses the problem of applying PWI in the presence of arbitrarily shaped interfaces, which is a common problem in NDT. First, the mathematical formulation for generating a plane wave inside a component of arbitrary geometry is given, and the characteristics of the resultant acoustic field are analyzed by simulation, showing plane wavefronts with non-uniform amplitude. Then, an imaging strategy is proposed, accounting for this amplitude effect. Finally, the proposed method is experimentally validated, and its application limits are discussed.

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“…By optimising the steering angles of the transmitted plane waves, this method can achieve a high frame rate with adequate image quality. The PWI algorithm has also been developed for multimodal imaging cases [ 10 ] and inspecting the structures through an irregular surface [ 11 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparison of Time Domain and Frequency-Wavenumber Domain Ultrasonic Array Imaging Algorithms for Non-Destructive Evaluation

Zhuang

Zhang

Lian

et al. 2020

Sensors

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Ultrasonic array imaging algorithms have been widely developed and used for non-destructive evaluation (NDE) in the last two decades. In this paper two widely used time domain algorithms are compared with two emerging frequency domain algorithms in terms of imaging performance and computational speed. The time domain algorithms explored here are the total focusing method (TFM) and plane wave imaging (PWI) and the frequency domain algorithms are the wavenumber algorithm and Lu’s frequency-wavenumber domain implementation of PWI. In order to make a fair comparison, each algorithm was first investigated to choose imaging parameters leading to overall good imaging resolution and signal-to-noise-ratio. To reflect the diversity of samples encountered in NDE, the comparison is made using both a low noise material (aluminium) and a high noise material (copper). It is shown that whilst wavenumber and frequency domain PWI imaging algorithms can lead to fast imaging, they require careful selection of imaging parameters.

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Plane wave imaging for ultrasonic inspection of irregular structures with high frame rates

Cited by 13 publications

References 4 publications

Plane Wave Imaging Techniques for Immersion Testing of Components With Nonplanar Surfaces

Plane Wave Imaging Techniques for Immersion Testing of Components With Nonplanar Surfaces

Plane Wave Imaging through Interfaces

Comparison of Time Domain and Frequency-Wavenumber Domain Ultrasonic Array Imaging Algorithms for Non-Destructive Evaluation

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