• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.21 no.7
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• pp.592-599
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• 2002

In this study, an ultrasonic transducer was designed with a commercial finite element analysis (FEA) code, PZFlex, and fabricated based on the design. The transducer has the dimension and shape suitable for abdomen diagnosis working at 5 ㎒ and consists of 128 piezoelectric elements disposed in a convex linear array form. The transducer is composed of two impedance matching layers, one backing layer, and kerfs placed between the piezoelectric elements. Validity of the design with the FEA was illustrated through experimental characterization of a sample transducer. Comparison with the design results by equivalent circuit analysis method was also made to check the superiority of the FEA design.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.1418-1425
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• 2014

In ultrasonic medical imaging, spatial compounding of images is a technique where ultrasonic beam is steered to examine patient tissues in multiple angles. In the conventional ultrasonic diagnostic imaging, the steering of the ultrasonic beam is achieved electronically using the phased array transducer elements. In this paper, a spatial compounding approach is presented where the ultrasonic probe element is rotated mechanically and the beam steering is achieved mechanically. In the spatial compounding, target position is computed using the value of the rotation axis and the transducer array angular position. However, in the process of the rotation mechanism construction and the control system there arises the inevitable uncertainties in these values. These geometric parameter errors result in the target position error, and the consequence is a blurry compounded image. In order to reduce these target position errors, we present a spatial compounding scheme where error correcting transformation matrices are computed and applied to the raw images before spatial compounding to reduce the blurriness in the compounded image. The proposed scheme is illustrated using phantom and live scan images of human knee, and it is shown that the blurriness is effectively reduced.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Navigation
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• v.5 no.2
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• pp.1-39
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• 1981

A doppler log is the typical device which can measure the ship's speed over the ground directly, by means of doppler effect of the underwater ultrasonic wave, which involves the error due to the sea bottom inclination, the trim and the incorrect transducer installation etc. The present doppler log adopts a single transducer, faced in the direction of themain beam, and therefore it is unable to correct the beam direction to eliminate the above mentioned error. Moreover, the frequencyis also limitted in a comparatively high range for getting a sharp beam with single transducer, and the speed over the ground can not be detectable at the deep sea, for an instance, over 200 meters. This paper describes a theoretical consideration for the doppler log error and an analysis by a computer on the observed speed data by a full size model ship. The result is verified that the most of doppler log error is caused by the ultrasonic beam angle of transducer. To eliminate the doppler log error due to the incorrect transducer installation and also to sharpen the beam for lower frequency range to expand measurable sea depth, this paper proposes a method of controlling the directivity adopting a linear transducer array and of controlling the directivity by the control of exciting current, and investigates by the computer simulation and make experiment with magnetostrictive ferrite transducer of 28, 50 and 75KHz. The experimental results are shown well coincide with the measured ones, and they are revealed that in case where the transducer interval is greater than 1 wavelength, the effective control of the beam direction is hardly performed with keeping adequate beam width and side lobe level. It is concluded that 6-elements array with inter element space of a half wavelength can make comparatively sharp beam and low side lobe level. The results obtained here will contribute very much to the improvement of the performance of doppler log.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 1987.07b
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• pp.1252-1255
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• 1987

In this paper an approach for the analysis of the transient field response of radially symmetric transducer due to a wideband ultrasonic pulse is presented, which is based on a development of Green's function and applies the linear system theory to obtain an analytic expression for the impulse response of an annulus with a planar or spherical geometry. For the focused annular array, the impulse responses of the indivisual annuli are convolved with the delayed excitation pulse, and then summed to obtain the resultant response of the array. This process is very effective in the study of the various focusing abilities of the annular array. For illustration, the field distribution of a five element annular array is treated in detail for several focusing system.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.21 no.4
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• pp.65-71
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• 1984

The design formular of optical focusing systems cannot be applied to ultrasonic B scanners, which use broadband pulses instead of continuous wave. In this paper, a calculation method is studied for analyzing the propagation of ultrasonic broadband pulse excited by ultrasonic array transducers. Using the results, seveial design parameters such as the number of transducer elements, delay time, and the focal point are determined to obtain high resolution in the ultrasonic dynamic focusing system. A dynamic focusing system with low-noise switching characteristics; which attains lateral resolution of 2-3mm all along the axial direction up to 18 cm with a 3.5 MHz linear array transducer, was implemented.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.28 no.5
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• pp.427-435
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• 2008

Inspection of dissimilar metal welds using phased array ultrasound is not easy at all, because crystalline structure of dissimilar metal welds cause deviation and splitting of the ultrasonic beams. Thus, in order to have focusing and/or steering phased array beams in dissimilar metal welds, proper time delays should be determined by ray tracing. In this paper, we proposed an effective approach to solve this difficult problem. Specifically, we modify the Oglivy's model parameters to describe the crystalline structure of real dissimilar metal welds in a fabricated specimen. And then, we calculate the proper time delay and incident angle of linear phased array transducer in the anisotropic and inhomogeneous material for focusing and/or steering phased array ultrasonic beams on the desired position.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.33-40
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• 1984

In the conventional pulsed doppler system, gated CW is used to excite a ultrasonic transducer so that a group of linear RF amplifiers are required to excite a ultrasonic array transducer in the scanning pulsed doppler system. A pulsed doppler system without linear high voltage RF amplifiers, which excites the transducer impulsively, is studied theoretically and experimentally. In this paper, an experimental 8-channel pulsed doppler system is implemented, which uses quadrature defection to detect the direction of motion and can compensate the attenuation effect. The designed pulsed doppler system shows the possibility of real time multichannel doppler flow meter.

• Proceedings of the Acoustical Society of Korea Conference
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• 1991.06a
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• pp.136-141
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• 1991

초음파 영상 진단기에서 영상의 질을 높이기 위해서는 넓은 범우에서 높은 측 방향 해상도가 요구된다. 측 방향 해상도는 변환기에 의해 발생되는 초음파 빔폭에 의해 좌우되는데 기존의 변환기는 초점 부근에서는 빔폭이 매우 좁으나 집속 범위가 제한되는 단점이 있다. 본 논문에서는 넓은 범위에서 균일한 빔폭을 얻을 수 있는 새로운 형태의 변환기를 제안하고 변환기에 의한 음장 분포를 전산기 모의 실험을 통해 구하였으며 그 결과 초점 부근에서는 빔 폭이 기존의 변환기에 비해 다소 넓어지나 집속 범위가 기존의 변화기에 비해 넓어지는 것을 확인할 수 있었다.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.5
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• pp.215-220
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• 2008

The kerfs between arrayed piezoelectric elements in a medical ultrasonic transducer or a piezoelectric composite transducer are generally filled by polymeric materials. The boundary condition of the elements for lateral mode vibration is changed according to the kerf-filling materials, so that the resonance frequency for longitudinal mode of the transducer is also varied. In this study, to investigate the resonance frequency variation for an arrayed transducer experimentally, the piezoelectric vibration elements of $14mm{\times}0.22mm{\times}0.44mm$ were fabricated and those were linearly arrayed. And, the resonance frequencies were measured for three cases of kerf-filling condition, non-filling and two different kinds of epoxy filling. Conclusively, it is confirmed that the resonant frequency variation shows the similar tendency with the theoretical one for the longitudinal mode.

• Proceedings of the Korea Committee for Ocean Resources and Engineering Conference
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• 2006.11a
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• pp.41-45
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• 2006

The fabrication process of fiber placement system of carbon fiber reinforced plastic (CFRP) requires real time process control and reliable inspection to ensure quality by preventing defects such as delamination and void. Therefore, novel non-contact inspection technique is required during the non-destructive evaluation in a fiber placement system. For the inspection of delamination in CFRP, various methods to receive laser-generated ultrasound were applied by using piezoelectric transducer, air-coupled transducer, wavelet transform and scanning laser ultrasonic technique. Laser-generated ultrasound was received with a conventional piezoelectric sensor in contacting manner. Then signal characteristics due to defects were analyzed to find a factor for detecting defects. Air-coupled transducer was used for reception of laser-generated guided wave using linear slit array in order to generate high frequency guided wave. And line scan technique was used to confirm the capability of on-line application. The high frequency component of laser-generated guided wave received with piezoelectric sensor disappeared after propagating through delamination region. Nevertheless, it was failed to receive high frequency guided wave in using air-coupled transducer. The first peak of the frequency spectrum under 100kHz in the delamination region is higher than in the sound region. By using this feature, the line scanned frequency data were acquired in fully non-contact generation and reception of ultrasound. This method was proved as useful technique for detecting delamination in CFRP.