A High-Speed Ultrasound Full-Matrix Capture Acquisition System for Robotic Weld Inspection

Abstract

Phased-Array Ultrasonic Technique is traditionally used for the non-destructive inspection of welds and supported by industrial-grade inspection equipment. FullMatrix Capture (FMC) with Total Focusing Method (TFM) provide new capabilities and multimodal imaging, but available commercial scanners have limitations in acquisition speed (30–300MB/s) and reconstruction speed. Our goal was to develop a solution for FMC acquisition that can be applied to high-speed robotized weld scanning (speed of 100 mm/s with a resolution of 1 mm). For FMC acquisition, we have applied a portable programmable ultrasound research system us4R-lite™ (us4us Ltd., Poland) in a 64:256 channel configuration and standard angled 32-element Phased-Array probes. The system can acquire and store raw RF or demodulated I/Q data at a speed of 2–6 GB/s, enabling real-time FMC at high speed. Data can be stored on a PC during scanning and processed by a high-performance GPU. We have successfully tested our experimental setup while scanning flat-section welds with a motorized scanner at a speed approaching 100 mm/s. The acquisition and processing software developed uses Nvidia CUDA on GPU and can manage real-time storage and scanning. Next, we are planning to integrate the solution into an industrialgrade high-speed FMC acquisition system with embedded GPU processing.