Low-Cost, Underwater, Ultrasonic Phased Array Research Platform

This work presents an acoustic phased array that is open source and easy-to-modify. The phased array is intended to be used for marine biological ultrasound imaging research. The phased array costs 1710 USD, and this low cost was achieved by using off-the-shelf piezoelectric transducers and by building transmit and receive analog front ends using low-cost microcontrollers and analog pulse-shaping circuits. The array was characterized by measuring its radiation pattern and point spread function, and both of those measurements closely match theory. The transmit beam steering resolution is 1.8° and the receive beam steering resolution is 0.5°. The array was used to successfully capture an image of a static object 1.2 meters in front and 0.15 meters to the right of the array in a test tank.