4. Multichannel Transmitters
4.1. Transmit Signals
LRUT uses a relatively low frequency range, typically between 20kHz and 100kHz, to
generate the guided waves necessary to obtain longer test distance, up to 100 meters
compared to a few centimetres in conventional ultrasound testing (UT) methods. Further,
tone burst excitation of the transducers is used to control signal bandwidth. In order to
drive the high capacitance piezoelectric transducers a windowed tone-burst with a
maximum output of 300V peak to peak output voltage is used. This signal is typically
10 cycles of sinusoid waves multiplied by a Hann window. This is generated digitally
and fed to a DAC for input to the transmitter amplifiers. Each cycle of the sinusoidal
wave is constructed by N samples per cycle. According to Nyquist-Shannon sampling
theory, N needs to be equal or greater than two. Practically, this number needs to be
equal to or greater than 10 to allow a smooth reconstruction of the waveform. For a
maximum signal frequency of 100 kHz, a 1 MHz sampling frequency is necessary to
reconstruct the waveform, giving at least 10 samples per cycle. Apart from distortion of
the pulse, if there are too few points per cycle of the waveform the voltage difference
between two sequential samples could be sufficiently large that an excessive current
may occur in the electronic circuits driving a highly capacitive transducer load. One