Real Time Synthetic Aperture Imaging System

A synthetic-aperture acoustic imaging system has been developed which employs digital electronics to perform real-time imaging with a 32-element acoustic transducer array. This system has also been implemented on a computer (not real-time) so that new concepts can be tested before they are implemented in hardware. A number of real-time and computer-reconstructed images are presented to illustrate the performance of this system, including images obtained using longitudinal waves in a water tank and Rayleigh (surface) waves on aluminum samples. Computer-generated contour plots are shown to illustrate the point response of this system and to demonstrate the resolution and sidelobe levels obtained with this synthetic-aperture technique.