P2F-7 Acoustic Wave Amplitude Estimation Based on Harmonic Distortion in Water

Pressure amplitude measurement is important for safety assessment of an ultrasound system or for general research on ultrasound. Usually, the pressure amplitude is measured with a calibrated hydrophone. The need for a high accuracy in the pressure measurement involves a hydrophone calibration by an accredited laboratory which can be prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the pressure amplitude at a certain position in the ultrasound field, using an uncalibrated single element transducer of which the relative frequency response has been measured. We show that the technique can reach better than 20% accuracy, which is comparable to calibrated hydrophone measurement. We describe the method for a focused and an unfocused transmitting transducer using KZK simulations and measurements performed in degassed water