A 3-D PW ultrasonic Doppler flowmeter: theory and experimental characterization.

A complete 3-D ultrasonic pulsed Doppler system has been developed to measure quantitatively the velocity vector field of a fluid flow independently of the probe position. The probe consists of four 2.5 MHz piezocomposite ultrasonic transducers (one central transmitter and three receivers separated by 120 degrees ) to measure the velocity projections along three different directions. The Doppler shift of the three channels is calculated by analog phase and quadrature demodulation, then digitally processed to extract the mean velocity from the complex spectrum. The accuracy of the 3-D Doppler technique has been tested on a moving string phantom providing an error of about 4% for both amplitude and direction with an acquisition window of 100 ms.