• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.867-876
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• 2019

Second harmonic generation using nonlinear ultrasonic waves have been shown to be an early indicator of possible fatigue damage in nuclear power plant components. This technique relies on measuring amplitudes, making it highly susceptible to variations in transducer coupling and instrumentation. This paper proposes an experimental procedure for in-situ surface wave nonlinear ultrasound measurements on specimen with permanently mounted transducers under high cycle fatigue loading without interrupting the experiment. It allows continuous monitoring and minimizes variation due to transducer coupling. Moreover, relations describing the effects of the measurement system nonlinearity including the effects of the material transfer function on the measured nonlinearity parameter are derived. An in-situ high cycle fatigue test was conducted using two 304 stainless steel specimens with two different excitation frequencies. A comprehensive analysis of the nonlinear sources, which result in variations in the measured nonlinearity parameters, was performed and the effects of the system nonlinearities are explained and identified. In both specimens, monotonic trend was observed in nonlinear parameter when the value of fundamental amplitude was not changing.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.268-272
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• 2013

The aim of this study was to develop an ultrasonic tooth-whitening apparatus using piezoelectric transducers, which enhance bleaching efficiency by applying ultrasound, while performing a teeth whitening procedure. For this purpose, an ultrasonic transducer was designed and manufactured, and the effects of reduction in the whitening material's concentration and in the whitening treatment time through using the ultrasound cavitation phenomenon were confirmed. Also, the validity of this study was investigated by comparing the whitening performance with a commercialized optical whitener, through color comparison. The results revealed that the ultrasound whitener produced color values that were enhanced by as much as double that of the conventional LED light whitening method. Even when the operational time was reduced by half, the ultrasound method showed superior performance by over 54% compared to the conventional light whitener, revealing that the ultrasound method showed a remarkable treatment reduction effect.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.22 no.8
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• pp.622-628
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• 2003

Recently, ultrasound transducers in several tens MHz band, which can give the spatial resolution higher than several tens micrometers, have been intensively studying for applying to medical diagnostic fields of ophthalmology and dermatology. In this paper, the background of the studies, structures and characteristics of the transducers, and images obtained by the transducers are briefly reviewed.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.153-160
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• 2018

3D ultrasound bladder scanners are getting popular in hospitals for the patients with bladder dysfunction. A current bladder scanner adopts a mechanical scan to acquire 3D images and requires two motors and complicated mechanical devices. In this paper, we propose a new ultrasound bladder scanner using hand-motion scan. Instead of two motors and mechanical devices, it has a motion sensor to record transducer positions during hand-motion scan. The experiments with a bladder phantom and volunteers showed similar measurement accuracy to a conventional 3D ultrasound bladder scanner. We expect that the proposed method will reduce the cost and size of the bladder scanner.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.148-156
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• 2016

The paper deals with improvement of a piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer for measuring both pipe thickness and flow velocity. The transducer structure is based on the conventional transducers for measuring flow velocity by obliquely transmitting ultrasonic waves to the flow direction. The transducer invented earlier for measuring flow velocity and pipe thickness had an advantage of including only one piezoelectric disc, but for the thickness measurement the ultrasonic wave had to be reflected twice in a wedge material to be transmitted vertically to a pipe, and thus the wave signal was too weak. The transducer has been improved to transmit waves for thickness measurement vertically to a pipe without any prior reflection by electrically connecting two piezoelectric discs, one for flow velocity and the other for pipe thickness measurement. By comparing the measured results of specimen thickness with the improved transducer and conventional transducers, the accuracies of the improved one have been evaluated in the pipe thickness measurements.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.25 no.6
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• pp.446-450
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• 2005

We have built a spherically focused, not using acoustic mirrors, capacitive micromachined air-coupled ultrasonic transducer. A flexible backplate of a copper/polyimide backplate is used, permitting it to conform to a spherically shaped substrate. The backplate is patterned with $40-{\mu}m$ depressions having $80-{\mu}m$ center-to-center spacing. A $6-{\mu}m$ thick aluminized Mylar film completing the transducer is deformed to allow it to conform to the spherical backplate. The device's frequency spectrum is centered at 805kHz with -6dB points at 440 and 1210kHz.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.4E
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• pp.159-165
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• 2006

Human, horse and rat bloods in a cylindrical chamber where flow was controlled by a stirring magnet were used for studying red blood cell aggregation. Ultrasound backscattered powers from blood were obtained from the backscattered signals measured by a 5 MHz focused transducer in a pulse-echo setup. The experimental results showed the differences in red blood cell (RBC) aggregation tendency among the three mammalian species with an order of horse > human > rat. The ultrasound backscattered power decreased with stirring speed in human and horse blood, but no variations were observed in rat blood. Sudden flow stoppage led to the slow increase of the backscattered power for human and horse blood. There was no self-aggregation tendency in rat blood. The enveloped echo images showed the spatial and temporal variations of RBC aggregations in the cylindrical chamber. These observations from the different mammalian species may give a better understanding of the mechanism of RBC aggregation.

• Journal of Sensor Science and Technology
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.286-292
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• 2022

As mobile electronics become smarter, higher-level security systems are necessary to protect private information and property from hackers. For this, biometric authentication systems have been widely studied, where the recognition of unique biological traits of an individual, such as the face, iris, fingerprint, and voice, is required to operate the device. Among them, ultrasound fingerprint imaging technology using piezoelectric materials is one of the most promising approaches adopted by Samsung Galaxy smartphones. In this review, we summarize the recent progress on piezoelectric ultrasound micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) transducers with various piezoelectric materials and provide insights to achieve the highest-level biometric authentication system for mobile electronics.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.39 no.6
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• pp.576-584
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• 2020

In order to obtain basic information for using polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) gel as a tissue mimicking phantom for temperature visualization, the temperature change characteristics due to the focused ultrasound were examined for different concentration of PVA. To obtain the basic acoustic characteristics, the speed of sound, the attenuation coefficient, and the density depending on the PVA concentration were measured, and the thermodynamic characteristics, such as thermal conductivity and heat capacity, were measured. The range of temperature rising in the vicinity of the focal point due to the focused ultrasound was observed using a thermochromic film that changes color at 30 degree or more, and the discolored area was obtained by image processing of the recorded image. As the concentration of PVA increases in the given range of 2 wt% ~ 16 wt%, the area that rises above 30 degree inside the gel increases linearly. It is confirmed that the discolored area increases as the power applied to the focused ultrasonic transducer increases. These results showed good agreement with the simulation results using the finite element method.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.44 no.4
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• pp.255-263
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• 2023

Clinical ultrasound (US) is a widely used imaging modality with various clinical applications. However, capturing a large field of view often requires specialized transducers which have limitations for specific clinical scenarios. Panoramic imaging offers an alternative approach by sequentially aligning image sections acquired from freehand sweeps using a standard transducer. To reconstruct a 3D volume from these 2D sections, an external device can be employed to track the transducer's motion accurately. However, the presence of optical or electrical interferences in a clinical setting often leads to incorrect measurements from such sensors. In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL) framework that enables the prediction of scan trajectories using only US data, eliminating the need for an external tracking device. Our approach incorporates diverse data types, including correlation volume, optical flow, B-mode images, and rawer data (IQ data). We develop a DL network capable of effectively handling these data types and introduce an attention technique to emphasize crucial local areas for precise trajectory prediction. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over other DL-based approaches in terms of long trajectory prediction performance. Our findings highlight the potential of employing DL techniques for trajectory estimation in clinical ultrasound, offering a promising alternative for panoramic imaging.