A comparison of deconvolution techniques for the ultrasonic nondestructive evaluation of materials

Several major deconvolution techniques commonly used for seismic applications are studied and adapted for ultrasonic NDE (nondestructive evaluation) applications. Comparisons of the relative merits of these techniques are presented based on a complete set of simulations on some real ultrasonic pulse echoes. Methods that rely largely on a reflection seismic model, such as one-at-a-time L(1) spike extraction and MVD (minimum variance deconvolution), are not suitable for the NDE applications discussed here because they are limited by their underlying model. L(2) and Wiener filtering, on the other hand, do not assume such a model and are, therefore, more flexible and suitable for these applications. The L(2) solutions, however, are often noisy due to numerical ill conditions. This problem is partially solved in Wiener filtering, simply by adding a constant desensitizing factor q. The computational complexities of these Wiener filtering-based techniques are relatively moderate and are, therefore, more suitable for potential real-time implementations.