An ultrasonic caliper device for measuring acoustic nonlinearity

In medical and industrial ultrasound, it is often necessary to measure the acoustic properties of a material. A specific medical application requires measurements of sound speed, attenuation, and nonlinearity to characterize livers being evaluated for transplantation. For this application, a transmission-mode caliper device is proposed in which both transmit and receive transducers are directly coupled to a test sample, the propagation distance is measured with an indicator gage, and receive waveforms are recorded for analysis. In this configuration, accurate measurements of nonlinearity present particular challenges: diffraction effects can be considerable while nonlinear distortions over short distances typically remain small. To enable simple estimates of the nonlinearity coefficient from a quasi-linear approximation to the lossless Burgers' equation, the calipers utilize a large transmitter and plane waves are measured at distances of 15-50 mm. Waves at 667 kHz and pressures between 0.1 and 1 MPa were generated and measured in water at different distances; the nonlinearity coefficient of water was estimated from these measurements with a variability of approximately 10%. Ongoing efforts seek to test caliper performance in other media and improve accuracy via additional transducer calibrations.