Low frequency ultrasonic array imaging using signal post-processing for concrete material

The use of ultrasonic arrays to conduct nondestructive evaluation has significantly increased in recent years. A post-processing beam-forming technique that utilizes a complete set of signals of all combinations of transmission and reception el-ements was proposed as an array imaging technique. In this study, a delay-and-sum beam reconstruction method utilizing post-processing was applied to the imaging of internal voids and reinforced steel bars in concrete material. Due to the high attenuation of the ultrasonic wave in concrete, it is necessary to use an ultrasonic wave as the incident wave at low frequencies and high in-tensities. In this study, an array transducer with a total of 16 elements was designed on the basis of a multigaussian beam model. The center frequency of the transducer was 50 kHz, and low frequency imaging was achieved by performing computations using a graphics processing unit accelerators in the post-processing beam formation. The results indicated that the shapes of through holes a...