Implementation issues of 3D SAFT in time and frequency domain for the fast inspection of heavy plates

The Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) is a reconstruction strategy for ultrasonic non-destructive inspection, which allows the focusing of multiple measurements by superposition. Here, it is applied for the inspection of heavy plates, where a plate is scanned with a fast feed rate by an ultrasonic sensor and a decision about material quality (inclusions, holes, cracks, etc.) has to be made virtually in real-time. This raises high demands on the SAFT-reconstruction, which is due to its computational expense usually applied in post-processing. Consequently, specific tuning of the algorithm and a compromise in reconstruction quality vs. speed is required.