Using Field Programmable Gate Array Hardware for the Performance Improvement of Ultrasonic Wave Propagation Imaging System

Abstract

Recently, wave propagation imaging based on laser scanning-generated elastic waves has been intensively used for nondestructive inspection. However, the proficiency of the conventional software based system reduces when the scan area is large since the processing time increases significantly due to unavoidable processor multitasking, where computing resources are shared with multiple processes. Hence, the field programmable gate array (FPGA) was introduced for a wave propagation imaging method in order to obtain extreme processing time reduction. An FPGA board was used for the design, implementing post-processing ultrasonic wave propagation imaging (UWPI). The results were compared with the conventional system and considerable improvement was observed, with at least 78% (scanning of 100 × 100 mm 2 with 0.5 mm interval) to 87.5% (scanning of 200 × 200 mm 2 with 0.5 mm interval) less processing time, strengthening the claim for the research. This new concept to implement FPGA technology into the UPI system will act as a break-through technology for full-scale automatic inspection.

FPGA-based design and implementation of data acquisition and real-time processing for laser ultrasound propagation

“…The results were obtained for various scan areas and up to 87.55% of time reduction in result generation was achieved as shown in Fig. 1 [15]. Although, the data mapping generated by FPGA showed remarkable achievement in producing faster results but processing single algorithm does not fully utilize the parallelism offered by FPGA.…”