Processing of Ultrasonic Signals at the Place of Acquisition: Using Soft and Embedded Processor Cores

This research is devoted to the area of ultrasonic Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE), in particular, the monitoring of chemical reactions and development of high accuracy instrumentation for this purpose. Previous studies resulted in the development of a high accuracy measurement setup assembled from several rather expensive and bulky operators, including a personal computer for processing of the acquired ultrasonic waveform and extraction of the relevant information. It was noted that ultrasonic monitoring was complicated by a strong dependence of ultrasonic velocity on temperature, and a special ultrasound wave reflector was developed to allow extraction of the temperature information from the acquired waveforms. The present research aimed to integrate high resolution ultrasonic data acquisition instrumentation with fully automated data processing using a low cost FPGA and embedded soft core processor technology in order to achieve high measurement throughput for ultrasonic monitoring of chemical processes in real time.