High Accuracy Time of Flight Measurement Using Digital Signal Processing Techniques for Subsea Applications

Abstract

The techniques widely used in ultrasonic measurements are based on the determination of the time of flight (T.o.F). A short train of waves is transmitted and same transducer is used for reception of the reflected signal for the pulse-echo measurement applications. The amplitude of the received waveform is an envelope which starts from zero reaches to a peak and then dies out. The echoes are mostly detected by simple threshold crossing technique, which is also cause of error. In this paper digital signal processing is used to calculate the time delay in reception i.e. T.o.F, for which a maximum similarity between the reference and the delayed echo signals is obtained. To observe the effect of phase un-certainties and frequency shifts (Doppler), this processing is carried out, both directly on the actual wave shape and after extracting the envelopes of the reference and delayed echo signals. Several digital signal processing algorithms are considered and the effects of different factors such as sampling rate, resolution of digitization and S/N ratio are analyzed. Result show accuracy, computing time and cost for different techniques.