A multichannel data acquisition system design for Guided Waves Ultrasound Testing

Guided Waves Ultrasound Testing (GWUT) is a non-destructive testing (NDT) testing technology, widely used in industry for testing corrosion and degradations in long distance pipelines. GWUT has the advantage of 100% coverage of the pipe wall over many meters from a single test location. Multiple transmit and receive channels are required to drive a large number of piezoelectric transducers in order to excite axisymmetric GWU that are uniform around the pipe circumference for even inspection. This paper presents an efficient and reliable multichannel receiver system design for the GWUT, which makes it possible for meeting critical timing requirements for multichannel data acquisition with real-time DSP functions, such as accumulation and saturation detection. The design has been successfully used in a new generation commercial testing equipment to improve the system efficiency by reducing component counts, PCB size and power consumption. The system has been designed not only to meet the current hardware specifications, but also with the potential to increase the number of receiver channels for a more complicated system.