Along with appropriate transducers and an oscilloscope they can be used for flaw detection and thickness gauging in a wide variety of metals, plastics, ceramics, and composites. The pulser section of the instrument generates short, large amplitude electric pulses of controlled energy which, when applied to an ultrasonic transducer, are converted into short ultrasonic pulses. Most pulser sections have very low impedance outputs to better drive transducers. In the receiver section the voltage signals produced by the transducer, which represents the received ultrasonic pulses, are amplified by a noise receiver section. Some pulser-receivers include filtering, time gating, and other useful control features.
Many new models are completely computer interfaced for control and data acquisition.
The pulser-receiver can be used in material characterization work measuring sound velocity or attenuation, which in turn can be correlated to such material properties as elastic modulus or grain orientation. In conjunction with a stepless gate and a spectrum analyzer the pulser-receiver can also be used to study frequency dependent material properties or to characterize the performance of ultrasonic transducers.