Experimental determination of the single point echo of an ultrasonic transducer using a tomographic approach

The impulse response method is often used to study the ultrasonic field radiated by planar or gently curved transducers. This, however, requires one transmitting and one receiving transducer which has to be placed with great accuracy in the ultrasonic field. Here we propose a measuring method with only one transducer which acts both as transmitter and receiver. Echoes from sliding halfplanes are registered and by using tomographic methods, the echo from a single point in the same plane as the halfplanes can then be calculated. Beside the ultrasonic field, these calculations will yield us the transducer´s characteristics. These can be used to extract further information from an echo of an arbitrary surface, such as the gradient of the surface.