Investigation of an angular spectrum approach for pulsed ultrasound fields

An Angular Spectrum Approach (ASA) is formulated and employed to simulate linear pulsed ultrasound fields for high bandwidth signals. A geometrically focused piston transducer is used as the acoustic source. Signals are cross-correlated to find the true sound speed during the measurement to make the simulated and measured pulses in phase for comparisons. The calculated sound speed in the measurement is varied between 1487.45 m/s and 1487.75 m/s by using different initial values in the ASA simulation. Results from the pulsed ASA simulations using both Field II simulated and hydrophone measured acoustic sources are compared to the Field II simulated and hydrophone measured pulses, respectively. The total relative root mean square (RMS) errors of the pulsed ASA are investigated by using different time-point, zero-padding factors, spatial sampling interval and temporal sampling frequency in the simulation. Optimal parameters for the ASA are found in the simulation. The RMS error of the ASA simulation is reduced from 10.9% to 2.4% for the optimal parameters when comparing to Field II simulations. The comparison between the ASA calculated and measured pulses are illustrated and the corresponding RMS error is 25.4%. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.