Ultrasonic Phased Array Device for Acoustic Imaging in Air

An ultrasonic phased array device is developed to provide mobility aid for visually impaired people. To perform acoustic imaging, two different linear transducer arrays are constructed using commercially available transducers. The transmitter and receiver arrays are formed with six and four transducer elements, respectively. Individual transducer elements are discrete components with a radius of 1.9 wavelengths and a half-power beamwidth of 43deg at 40.8 kHz center frequency. The transmitter array is formed by aligning the transducers with minimum spacing between the elements. Even this placement leads to the occurrence of unwanted grating lobes in the array response and decreases the field-of-view to 30deg . To eliminate these grating lobes, the elements of the receiver array are placed with a different spacing. Forming the receiver and transmitter arrays with nonidentical element spacing makes the grating lobes to appear at different places. Since the response of the overall system is the product of the directivity patterns of receiver and transmitter arrays, the grating lobes diminish for the overall system and the field-of-view increases. © 2008 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works