Phased Array Imaging with Real-Time FMC & TFM Capabilities

Why use the Vantage system for phased array imaging?

  • Supports all possible acquisition and imaging modes, from conventional B-scan, plane wave, virtual source and full matrix capture to cutting-edge ultra-high frame rate imaging and nonlinear imaging.

  • Extremely fast, user-programmable image reconstruction (on the order of 40 million pixels per second) combined with industry-leading data transfer rates (up to 6.6 GB/second sustained) provides users with a generalized high-speed TFM imaging framework. User definable phase-delay and amplitude weighted lookup tables make it convenient to implement any arbitrary TFM inspection with industry-leading frame rates.

  • Easy implementation of high-speed multi-mode/multi-view imaging.

  • Support for asynchronous mode, allowing image reconstruction in parallel to data acquisition.This enables the subsequent data frame to be acquired during the processing of the current frame. Asynchronous mode also enables real-time, processed image display while the system is acquiring and buffering data at a much faster frame rate.

  • The image reconstruction of the Vantage system is user-programmable, enabling generalized TFM imaging for any given media or inspection configuration to be easily implemented with cutting-edge image quality and framerate.

  • Easy to integrate custom transducers of any configuration and geometry. Examples include CMUT arrays, single crystal arrays, ring arrays, convex/concave arrays, outward looking arrays, matrix arrays, row column arrays and flexible arrays.

  • Programmable tri-state pulser with extended burst duration capability allows for high fidelity arbitrary waveform transmission for advanced pulse encoding techniques.

What are FMC and TFM?

Full matrix capture (FMC) is a data acquisition scheme for collecting data from all possible transmit-receive element pairs for a given array, theoretically providing all linear material information obtainable by the array.

Through coherent compounding in post-processing of a full matrix, the total focusing method (TFM) synthesizes transmit and receive focusing retrospectively at each pixel, producing images with ideal spatial and contrast resolution, thus increasing the sensitivity and reliability of inspections.

Shown above is a demonstration of FMC with real-time image reconstruction and display acquired with a Vantage system. The FMC data was acquired with a 5 MHz, 64-element phased array transducer (Imasonic).
The video clip shows the real-time TFM imaging speed possible using the Vantage system. In this example, using 64 channels with 13,500 pixels per frame, the system achieves imaging at 35 frames per second.
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NDE/NDT Applications & Techniques
NDE/NDT with Vantage