Embedded Industrial System for Calculation-Intensive Ultrasound Applications

Ultrasound systems are nowadays used in a wide range of industrial applications. These include, for example, the monitoring of buildings structures, the rheological characterization of industrial fluids and suspensions, the quality control of food, the integrity check of waste in nuclear plants, and many others. Many of these applications require high-performance ultrasound systems capable to process a huge amount of data in a short amount of time, in particular when the systems work in-line in a continuous production process. Moreover, researchers propose more and more calculation-intensive ultrasound methods that represent a challenge for the systems hardware. In this work we present a fully configurable ultrasound system specifically designed for demanding high-end industrial applications. Its hardware includes the ultrasound analog front-end that drives 8 transducers with a 0.5-10MHz bandwidth; the digital signal-processing section based on a high-end FPGA; a 1GB memory buffer; 1Gb Ethernet and USB3 interfaces to host; general analog and digital input/output for external devices like PT100 and pressure sensors. A test application shows the system capable of producing in real-time high-resolution flow profiles of fluids moving in a pipe with rms error less than 3% for a input signal with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 4dB.