TY - JOUR A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Maack, Stefan A1 - Schweitzer, T. A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph T1 - Enhancing the spectral signatures of ultrasonic fluidic transducer pulses for improved time-of-flight measurements N2 - Air-coupled ultrasonic (ACU) testing has proven to be a valuable method for increasing the speed in non-destructive ultrasonic testing and the investigation of sensitive specimens. A major obstacle to implementing ACU methods is the significant signal power loss at the air–specimen and transducer–air interfaces. The loss between transducer and air can be eliminated by using recently developed fluidic transducers. These transducers use pressurized air and a natural flow instability to generate high sound power signals. Due to this self-excited flow instability, the individual pulses are dissimilar in length, amplitude, and phase. These amplitude and angle modulated pulses offer the great opportunity to further increase the signal-to-noise ratio with pulse compression methods. In practice, multi-input multi-output (MIMO) setups reduce the time required to scan the specimen surface, but demand high pulse discriminability. By applying envelope removal techniques to the individual pulses, the pulse discriminability is increased allowing only the remaining phase information to be targeted for analysis. Finally, semi-synthetic experiments are presented to verify the applicability of the envelope removal method and highlight the suitability of the fluidic transducer for MIMO setups. KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Fluidics KW - Signal processing KW - Pulse compression KW - MIMO KW - Hilbert transform PY - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-537853 SN - 0041-624X VL - 119 SP - 1 EP - 12 PB - Elsevier B.V. CY - Amsterdam, Netherlands AN - OPUS4-53785 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER - TY - CONF A1 - Strangfeld, Christoph A1 - Bühling, Benjamin A1 - Hauke, M. A1 - Schweitzer, T. A1 - Maack, Stefan T1 - Frequency modulated, air-coupled ultrasound generated by fluidic oscillators N2 - The majority of ultrasonic devices used for non-destructive testing in civil engineering require contact with the surface of the concrete (specimen), which significantly increases the time required for the measurement. This makes it impractical for extensive investigation of large-scale structures such as bridge decks, foundations, or tunnels. In a pioneering approach, fluidic oscillators are used as contact free ultrasonic sources to overcome the aforementioned limitations. These robust and cost-effective actuators require only pressurised air and are ideally suited for harsh environments. At a constant supply pressure, they generate a continuous mono-frequent actuation signal. Further, varying the supply pressure via a fast pressure regulator was found to generate a frequency modulated signal which enabled time-of-flight measurement with an added advantage of increased signal to noise ratio. To demonstrate the feasibility of this novel idea of non-contact ultrasound, the results of the initial tests are presented. T2 - IEEE International Ultrasound Symposium CY - Venice, Italy DA - 11.10.2022 KW - Air-coupled ultrasound KW - Frequency modulation KW - Non-destructive testing KW - Civil engineering KW - Building materials KW - Fluidic oscillators PY - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/IUS54386.2022.9958740 SP - 1 EP - 4 AN - OPUS4-56073 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -