Theoretical and Experimental Investigation of Ultrasonic Focusing with Annular Phased Array

The focused acoustic field generated by an annular array transducer and its reflection field on a solid--liquid interface are investigated theoretically and experimentally. Theoretically, the concise analytic expressions about the radiation and reflection acoustic fields of the annular phased array are obtained by the ray approach method (saddle-point method). In experiment, an annular transducer with 8 equal-area elements is designed and fabricated, and a series of experiments about the radiation acoustic field and its reflection on the liquid-solid interface are carried out. The experimental characteristics of the transducer are in good agreement with the numerical ones. It shows the correctness of the theoretical result and the feasibility of dynamic focusing of the experiment system. With the maximum amplitude and its emergence time of the reflection wave, we can acquire the information and the imaging of the reflection interface by the annular phased array dynamic focusing.