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Development of a universal ultrasonic scanner system for nondestructive evaluation (NDE) of material degradation will allow the NDE users to utilize various scanning methods with a one stop system. Some ultrasonic scanning requires, water e.g. C-scan, Guided wave scan, some requires gel, e.g. hand held Pulse-echo and Phased Array, and some performs scan in air using air-coupled ultrasound. Additionally, in recent years development of new theories of wave propagation in phononic crystal and metamaterials demand scans of the systems using acoustic waves for fundamental understanding. There are many NDE system that can perform individual scans with specific objective. However, in addition to ultrasonic NDE scanning, acoustic scanning, guided wave scanning, biological sample inspection and many other forms of scanning e.g. Raman spectroscopy scanning to find material composition at various special spots of a material, may demand different setup and different mechanism. In this research we developed an ability to have a system that can utilize these various mechanisms and methods and unify them under one umbrella that can serve many applications in both research and commercial use. In this article, the discussion of the development and success of such a system will be elaborated on further as testing for various ultrasonic and acoustic methods on a variety of different materials (metal, composite, phononic crystals, metamaterials) have been proven successful. Tests using ultrasonic in both air and water and dry coupled scan was performed on various materials, yielding data to create ultrasonic images. These tests show the ease of use with the system and how simple it is to convert the scanner to utilize a different method as module of ultrasonic scanning. This scanner supports the use of various transducers at any frequency, Transmit and receive (T/R) mode and through mode with signal conditioning, and the ability to configure the resolution and size of the scan. This universal scanner has the protentional to be an all-around solution for NDE and acoustic research.
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