FPGA-based design and implementation of data acquisition and real-time processing for laser ultrasound propagation

Ultrasonic propagation imaging (UPI) has shown great potential for detection of impairments in complex structures and can be used in wide range of non-destructive evaluation and structural health monitoring applications. The software implementation of such algorithms showed a tendency in time-consumption with increment in scan area because the processor shares its resources with a number of programs running at the same time. This issue was addressed by using field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) that is a dedicated processing solution and used for high speed signal processing algorithms. For this purpose, we need an independent and flexible block of logic which can be used with continuously evolvable hardware based on FPGA. In this paper, we developed an FPGA-based ultrasonic propagation imaging system, where FPGA functions for both data acquisition system and real-time ultrasonic signal processing. The developed UPI system using FPGA board provides better cost-effectiveness and resolution than digitizers, and much faster signal processing time than CPU which was tested using basic ultrasonic propagation algorithms such as ultrasonic wave propagation imaging and multi-directional adjacent wave subtraction. Finally, a comparison of results for processing time between a CPU-based UPI system and the novel FPGA-based system were presented to justify the objective of this research.