History of Ultrasonic

Phased Arrays
The Early Years Of Ultrasonics
 Original Work
 As early as 1959 Tom Brown at Kelvin and
Hughes filed for a patent of an annular
dynamically focused transducer system
which later became known as a phased
array.
 Early scientific research in the 1960’s was
mainly restricted to laboratory work but in
the late 60’s and early 70’s medical
physicists became encouraged by the
potential of ultrasonic imaging of the
human body.
Is It A Boy Or A Girl?
 Early Scientific Developments
 Jan C Somer was one
of the acknowledged
scientists who studied
ultrasonic imaging in
medical applications
 First published work
on electronic scanning
for ultrasonic
diagnosis in 1968
 Principles of Array Excitation
 Arrays have moved from 4
piezoelectric elements to
electronic beam
manipulation using over
1000 individual
piezoelectric elements in
one transducer housing.
 Each of these elements is
individually electrically
connected to the ultrasonic
instrument facilitating
complex electronic
manipulation of the
acoustic wave fronts.
Contemporary Medical PA
 Industrial Phased Arrays
 Industrial application of ultrasonic
phased array technology has been
until the last decade, rather scarce
 This has been due to lack of
computing power needed for rapid
excitation of the multiple element
transducers and the need to process
large data files generated by the
scans
Contemporary Phased Array
Instruments

Models Available from R/DTech

 Contemporary Applications
 Raw material production: ingots, billets, bars…
 Aircraft: civil and defence: In-Service Inspection
 Naval: Military Pre-Service Inspection & In-
Service Inspection
 Power Generation: nuclear & fossil fuel: In-
Service Inspection
 Petrochemical: pipeline construction welds
 Applications can be on anything currently
applying pulse-echo testing
 Research: Any thing you want!
 What Product Medium are you interested in
testing

 Phased arrays technology may be the solution

 Acknowledgements
 Originally written by Tim Armitt at
Lavender International NDT Consultancy
Services, UK

 Examples of equipment in this

introduction are not exhaustive or a
reflection of any preferred equipment
either in specification or performance

 This presentation is part of a series being

produced by R/D Tech Certified Training
Partners
Questions