Performances of remote digital processing in automated non-destructive evaluation

Recent advances in transducers, electronic techniques, computer architectures and digital signal processing provide substantial improvements in automated non-destructive evaluation (ANDE) techniques. ANDE must fulfil very strict specifications, especially related to reliability (i.e., the quality of images, repetitiveness of acquisitions, etc.) and to the inspection speed. Multi-channel operation and digital signal processing provide a good solution to overcome strict NDE demands. In this paper, an approach based on a multi-channel remote system (R-SENDAS(1)) is presented, in which both signal conditioning and digital processing are done locally.The remote system performs complex algorithms for noise suppression, resolution improvement and smart data reduction at a sustained global processing rate of 10M samples per second. The central computer operates in parallel to attend to other jobs such as movement control, image display, etc. Several features of this solution related to noise immunity, system flexibility, system parallelism and other advantages are analysed in the paper. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.