NDE/NDT

Advanced Ultrasonic Research Capabilities for Material Science

Verasonics’ Vantage NXT platform offers high-performance, programmable phased-array and multi-channel ultrasound systems for academic and industrial NDE/NDT research, development and inspection.

Featuring the patented NXT transceiver, specifically engineered to provide the next level of transmit and receive fidelity required for cutting-edge ultrasound research and inspection. This includes industry-leading performance in transmit power, arbitrary waveform generation, waveform coding, nonlinear imaging, and more.

Additionally, Vantage NXT hardware and software architecture are designed to deliver the highest performance in acquisition speed, enabling continuous, uninterrupted data acquisition with scan speeds limited only by acoustic travel time.

Vantage NXT System with NXT UTA 160-DH/32 LEMO and Imasonic transducer

Vantage NXT with Imasonic transducer

Why Verasonics’ Systems for NDE/NDT?

Hardware Components

System configurations with 32, 64, 128, and 256 channels

Low-level programmability, with complete control of transmit and receive parameters at the channel level

Advanced tri-state transmitter:

High-speed acquisition and data transfer:

    • Data acquisition into local memory at more than 100,000 frames per second
    • High-speed data transfer from the data acquisition system to a computer at up to 6.6 GB/s sustained

Frequency bandwidth options from 20* kHz to 60 MHz

Universal Transducer Adapter (UTA) with a choice of adapters allows users to connect a broad range of commercially available or custom transducers.

* Note: Specifications are preliminary and subject to change without notice. Final product details are subject to change due to ongoing development and optimization.

Software Components

Intuitive sequence programming:

    • Low-level programmability of the hardware is provided through MATLAB and C SDKs, enabling precise control of all transmit, receive, and sequence timing attributes
    • The user may implement all data processing or, optionally, utilize a range of included signal processing, image reconstruction, display, and control functions

Image reconstruction option:

    • Fast synthetic delay-sum beamforming, supporting TFM, plane wave, virtual source imaging, and more
    • Image reconstruction on the order of 107 pixels per second using a standard, commercially available CPU
    • User-programmable synthetic beamforming delays for easy implementation of accurate, high frame-rate imaging for custom applications

NDE Imaging software option:

    • An easy-to-use, high-level graphical interface that complements the low-level user programmability
    • Provides advanced real-time imaging and convenient data acquisition without the need for programming by the user

Applications & Techniques

Meeting the demands of cutting-edge inspection speeds in phased-array, 3D imaging, and high-data-throughput applications requires more than just fast data transfer.

Vantage NXT features hardware and software engineered for the highest performance in acquisition speed, enabling continuous, uninterrupted data acquisition with scan speeds limited only by acoustic travel time.

Ultra-Fast Data Transfer: Up to 52.8 Gbit/s (6.6 GB/s) sustained

Asynchronous Architecture: Asynchronous hardware and software architectures enable concurrent acquisition, data transfer, and processing

Large Internal Memory: 256 MB/Channel, enabling long acquisitions, storage of large numbers of scan points, and multiple independent data buffers

GPU Direct: Data transfer directly to VRAM, removing the overhead in copying from CPU RAM
 
Fast image reconstruction: Highly optimized, user-programmable image reconstruction supporting modes including TFM, PWI, and custom acoustic paths, including support for inhomogeneous and isotropic materials
 

Example of the benefit of concurrent acquisition and data transfer: 10 cm Steel 5 MHz FMC 10 kHz PRF

The transceiver is the heart of an ultrasound acquisition device, but not all transceivers are created equal. Verasonics’ proprietary, patented NXT transceiver was engineered to deliver the next level of transmit fidelity and power required for cutting-edge ultrasound research and inspection with arbitrary and coded waveforms.

Arbitrary and coded waveforms enable improvements in sensitivity, SNR, resolution, and inspection speed compared to conventional, short ultrasonic pulses through techniques including pulse compression, time-reversal, ringing-cancelation, and nonlinear imaging.

Industry-leading transmit fidelity: Resolution, dynamic range, pulse inversion symmetry, harmonic distortion

High-power transmit: Continuous transmit on all channels for milliseconds duration (or seconds with option)
 
Coded waveform capabilities: Advanced waveform coding performance enabled by NXT transmit pulse symmetry and repeatability
 
Arbitrary Waveform Generation: Analog ultrasonic waveform generation performance approaching that of high bit-depth signal generators and linear amplifiers, achievable for high channel counts at a fraction of the price and power consumption

 

Example: Golay pulse compression

Leverage the transmit power and linearity of the NXT transceiver to improve SNR without slowing down inspection with data averaging. This example shows the advantages of Golay-code pulse-compression for improving SNR compared to conventional data averaging, imaging in HDPE with TFM at 5 MHz (dB scale).

A recent research trend has been the development of methods utilizing phased arrays to allow imaging of elastic nonlinearity. Elastic nonlinearity is a modality of interest in NDE for its sensitivity to macroscopic defects such as closed cracks and also the micro-structural material changes associated with damage precursors. Cutting-edge developments in nonlinear imaging necessitate high performance hardware, placing Vantage NXT as an ideal platform for such research.

The Vantage NXT platform provides excellent system linearity. The nonlinear diffuse energy imaging example demonstrates the upper limit of the system nonlinearity (the difference in output energy between full aperture and single element transmission), which is less than 0.5%. For methods using larger sub-apertures, such as the checkerboard approach, which use a half-array sub-aperture, the transmit nonlinearity is even smaller.

Verasonics Systems’ programmable tri-state pulser allows precise transmit bandwidth control, pulse inversion and multi-frequency pulse transmission for modulation methods. Pulse inversion can be used with two sequential transmissions to cancel linear terms by summation of the received data sets, directly producing a nonlinear residual.

Every Vantage NXT system includes programmable analog and digital filters to optimize the receive bandwidth. Programmable multi-stage gains optimize the receive dynamic range for the small signal amplitudes common in nonlinear measurements.

Verasoncis Systems support amplitude modulation and sub-aperture transmission methods including parallel-sequential field subtraction techniques.[/fusion_text]

An example of cutting-edge nonlinear imaging development on the Verasonics Systems is nonlinear diffuse energy imaging.  This method measures elasticity nonlinearly through evaluation of later-time statistical diffuse energy rather than waves scattered coherently from the measurement point, providing complete separation of linear and nonlinear modalities.

The precise control of the waveform provided by the tri-state transmitter increases achievable nonlinear measurement sensitivity, making Vantage NXT the ideal system for application and development of this technique.

Linear Imaging: TFM

Nonlinear Imaging: Diffuse Energy

Shown above is an example demonstrating the benefits of nonlinear ultrasonic imaging using the Vantage system.  Linear TFM and nonlinear diffuse energy images of a high-cycle fatigue crack within an aluminum compression test specimen acquired using a 5 MHz 64-element array (Imasonic).  The nonlinear image is seen to eliminate the linear back-wall and coherent noise features and more precisely resolve the size of the closed crack tip.