Ultrasonic imaging of sheet metal hydroforming-system overview and latest experimental results

The presented imaging system is designed for the use in a high pressure hydroforming process. In this environment, the contour of a sheet metal is to be detected by means of ultrasound. A reconstruction algorithm (synthetic aperture focusing technique, SAFT) was incorporated and first experiments under normal pressure were conducted. With these first experiments, the accuracy of the contour reconstruction from ultrasonic data is less than 0.65% and the mean reconstruction error is 0.28%.