The ultrasonic phased array technique is based on the division of a single transducer into a large number of individual elements. A sound beam is generated by electronic excitation of these elements. By delaying both the transmitted pulses and the received echoes the sound beam parameters such as angle, focal distance and focal point size can be controlled through software. The most common implementations are linear arrays, but recently matrix arrays are becoming more common with the benefit of 2-dimensional soundfield control.
The COMPAS-128 inspection system (compact phased array system) is equipped with 128 independent transmitting and receiving channels. This allows the operation of either 8 phased array probes with 16 elements each, or the control of 2 real time scanner probes with 64 elements each. This technique has great potential in automatic ultrasonic inspection. Main applications are the inspection of railway components, turbine inspection and the inspection of components in nuclear power plants. Following a long design tradition at BAM the COMPAS-128 represents the third generation of phased array instruments developed by our team providing a state-of-the-art inspection of high reliability components, which are increasingly employed in technical and public safety sector.
