Cambridge Ultrasonics

Ultrasonic Design

 Cambridge Ultrasonics is one of the few organizations in the World offering an ultrasonic system design service.

Ultrasonic design requires a good knowledge of ultrasonic technology, physics, mathematics and electronic engineering. Ultrasound systems need electronic circuits and software to work with them. Good design of ultrasonic systems therefore needs an unusual mix of skills not easily sourced. Cambridge Ultrasonics has this unique mix of skills.

Electronic engineers can see electrical signals using oscilloscopes and logic analyzers but ultrasonic engineers normally work blind, with no equivalent to let them see ultrasonic waves.

However, Cambridge Ultrasonics has two tools to help us see ultrasonic waves:

• Advanced visualization equipment lets us see ultrasonic waves experimentally. We have designed, built and refined this system over many years and we believe we lead the world in this technology.
•  Finite element (FE) modelling to predict wave propagation and to see the predictions as video. We have many years of experience in building FE models and we have specially developed a powerful PC platform to run FE sofware for modelling ultrasonic propagation problems.

Our unique combination of expertise linked to the power of seeing ultrasound makes an unbeatable combination.

Example Designs

Cambridge Ultrasonics was asked by the Institut fur Massivbau of the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) to provide equipment, transducers, low level software and guidance to help the Institut develop an advanced inspection system for concrete. The system was able to probe concrete to a depth of approximately 1 m and could detect back-wall echoes and tendon ducts in high strength concrete. This was the first system of its kind in the world to demonstrate pulse-echo detection working in concrete to a range of 1 m. Cambridge Ultrasonics provided transducer arrays specially adapted to work on concrete and signal processing specially adapted for inspecting concrete. We even built a transparent model of concrete and visualized waves travelling through it to help with the design.

A start-up business in USA asked Cambridge Ultrasonics to investigate ways to manipulate biological cells of about 10 µm size using ultrasound. Feasibility was demonstrated after a special transducer assembly was designed and built. It allowed cells to be marshalled and moved from position to position under electronic control. Movements of typically 1 mm were achieved in about 1 s. The advantage of the method is that the control of the cell position is set by software.