TRANSDUCER FIELD IMAGING USING ACOUSTOGRAPHY

A common current practice for transducer field mapping is to scan, point-by-point, a hydrophone element in a 2D raster at various distances from the transducer radiating surface. This approach is tedious, requiring hours of scanning time to generate full cross-sectional and/or axial field distributions. Moreover, the lateral resolution of the field distribution image is dependent on the indexing steps between data points. Acoustography is an imaging process in which an acousto-optical (AO) area sensor is employed to record the intensity of an ultrasound wavefield on a two-dimensional plane. This paper reports on the application of acoustography as a simple but practical method for assessing transducer field characteristics. A case study performed on a commercial transducer is reported, where the radiated fields are imaged using acoustography and compared to the corresponding quantities that are predicted numerically.