Directivity Investigation of two Annular Phased Array Transducers

Abstract Annular phased array transducers are well known in the medical field, with their main use being in ophthalmology and dermatology, and have started to be employed in the NDT industry relatively recently. Annular arrays consist of a centre circular element and multiple ring-shaped elements of different width. This unique geometry of the probe makes it difficult to determine the generating beam of the probe. For this reason, it was decided to produce directivity plots for individual elements for both probe configurations. The directivity plots were produced both experimentally and computationally. The generating knowledge of these plots will be novel for annular arrays since no previous work has been reported in the NDT industry.