Generating of short ultrasonic pulses using active damping

In non-destructive testing (NDT) with ultrasound the emission of short pulses is essentially if the echoes of nearby obstacles should be separated from the emitted signal. In this contribution a new approach is shown how to gene-rate a short ultrasonic pulse using a 3$-$1 composite transdu-cer. Therefore the ceramic bars, which are embedded in a polymer matrix, will be regarded as an exciter for the entire structure. After the pulse excitation the same bars can also be used for active damping to increase the bandwidth of the entire system. The Mason model serves as a basis for the de-scription of the ultrasonic transducer and is extended to the composite structure. The excitation signal is adaptively mo-dified by a suitable signal processing. Therefore the changes of boundary conditions, like the ambient temperature or acoustic impedance of adjacent media are considered.