Development of an intelligent ultrasonic phased array system for NDT of steel structures

An intelligent ultrasonic phased array system is being developed to obtain real time flaw images and to characterize flaws in steel structures. The system uses zone-based transmission focusing and dynamic receiver focusing to produce the ultrasonic images and an A-scan signal for a selected angle of incidence. For the optimized design of rectangular phased array transducers, a complete 3-D radiation beam model based on the boundary diffraction wave model is developed to predict near- and far-acoustic fields while radiated beams are focused and steered with phase delay. A time domain RF signal of a focused beam is predicted by the inverse Fourier transform of frequency domain solutions.