Havacılık ve Uzay Teknolojileri Dergisi (Jan 2018)
A REMOTE TONE BURST PULSER DESIGN FOR AUTOMATED ULTRASONIC SCANNING SYSTEMS
Abstract
In this work, a programmable remote ultrasonic tone burst pulser circuit design and implementation for Automated Water Squirting Ultrasonic Scanning Systems (AWSUSS) are presented. This pulser can be configured by a PC over RS422 communication interface thus parameters such as pulse frequency, pulse repetition frequency (PRF), number of pulses in a burst, and pulse type (Positive/Negative Squared Wave or Bipolar) are set by user. High-voltage tone burst pulser can be adjusted between ±150 V in 300 V range. Hardware design of the pulser was made by using a Microsemi DRF1400 Class D half bridge MOSFET. Proposed pulser can excite piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers in the range of 0.5 to 15 MHz. The pulser output can provide 300 Vpp pulses with less than 0.5 Vpp ripple during the operation under load while rise time is less than 16 nS. The remote pulser was used with Mistras AD IPR 1210 digitizer board and successful C-Scan ultrasonic inspection results of aircraft composite parts are reported in this work.
