In industrial and medical applications, ultrasonic signals are used in nondestructive testing (NDT), medical imaging, navigation, and... Show moreIn industrial and medical applications, ultrasonic signals are used in nondestructive testing (NDT), medical imaging, navigation, and communication. This study presents the architecture of high-performance computational systems designed for ultrasonic nondestructive testing, data compression using machine learning, and a multilayer perceptron neural network for ultrasonic flaw detection and grain size characterization. We researched and developed a real-time software-defined ultrasonic communication system for transmitting information through highly reverberant and dispersive solid channels. Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing is explored to combat the severe multipath effect in the solid channels and achieve an optimal bitrate solution. In this study, a reconfigurable, high-performance, low-cost, and real-time ultrasonic data acquisition and signal processing platform is designed based on an all-programmable system-on-chip (APSoC). We designed the unsupervised learning models using wavelet packet transformation optimized by convolutional autoencoder for massive ultrasonic data compression. The proposed learning models can achieve a compression accuracy of 98% by using only 6% of the original data. For ultrasonic signal analysis in NDT applications, we utilized the multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) to detect flaw echoes masked by strong microstructure scattering noise (i.e., about zero dB SNR or less) with detection accuracy above 99%. It is of high interest to characterize materials using ultrasonic scattering properties for grain size estimation and classification. We successfully designed an MLPNN to classify the grain sizes of materials with an accuracy of 99%. Furthermore, a software-defined ultrasonic communication system based on the APSoC is designed for real-time data transmission through solid channels. Transducers with a center frequency of 2.5 MHz are used to transmit and receive information-bearing ultrasonic waves in solid channels where the communication bit rate can reach up to 1.5 Mbps. Show less
