Embedded industrial system for calculation-intensive ultrasound applications

Ultrasound systems are nowadays used in a wide range of industrial applications, like, 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. A large number of these applications require high-performance ultrasound systems capable to process a huge amount of data in a short time interval, especially 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 an ultrasound analog front-end that drives 8 transducers with a 0.5-10 MHz bandwidth; a digital signal-processing section based on a high-end FPGA; a 1 GB memory buffer; 1 Gb Ethernet and USB3 interfaces to host; general analog and digital inputs/outputs 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 an input signal with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 4 dB.