SP 4f – Ultrasound (Notes)

Humans can hear sounds between about 20 Hz and 20 000 Hz in frequency (although this range decreases with age)

Sound with a frequency higher than 20,000 Hz is known as ultrasound and cannot be heard by humans.

Sound with a frequency lower than 20 Hz is known as infrasound and is too low pitch for us to hear.

Many animals, including bats and dolphins, use ultrasound to communicate or to find prey. Some animals,
including the hippopotamus, use infrasound for communication.

As well as using ultrasound to communicate, animals can also use it to find prey in the dark or simply to
navigate. This is known as echolocation.

Bats are nocturnal, but they are able to locate prey in the
dark (and distinguish between different types of prey)
by emitting clicks and pulses of ultrasound.
By working out how long it takes for all of the ultrasound
waves to bounce off an obstacle, the bat is able to
calculate the size and shape of the obstacle, and where it is.

Uses of ultrasound:

Sonar, fetal scanning, medical diagnosis, medical treatment and cleaning

Explain how ultrasound is used in sonar. (Refer text book page 60)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae-b9h8bEIY

• Sonar equipment carried on ships or submarines uses sound propagation to find the depth of the sea
or to detect fish.
• Submarines and ships can use ultrasound to navigate under water.
• A loudspeaker on the ship emits a pulse of ultrasound, which bounce of obstacles under water and
are reflected back to the vessel. This information is used to calculate the depth of the water.
Fetal scanning: (Refer text book page 61)

Ultrasound is commonly used in hospitals to examine the health of unborn babies. A hand held device emits harmless
pulses of ultrasound through the skin into the uterus. The same device picks up the returning ultrasound waves as they
reflected off the baby’s body. A computer turns this data into a static or moving image.

• When ultrasound is directed at the human body, the surfaces of different tissues inside the body partly
reflected the ultrasound depending on how deep inside the body the tissue surfaces are.
• The detected produces electrical signals which are sent to a computer and then displayed on a screen as a
picture/
• This is a clever way of seeing inside a body without causing any damage
• Ultrasound scans can safely be used to see an image of a developing baby inside the uterus of a pregnant
mother
• This is called fetal imagery/prenatal scanning and is useful to show if the baby is healthy

Identify the advantages and disadvantages of using ultrasound in medical imaging.

Advantages:
• No ionising radiation
• Produces images of soft tissues and fluid.
• Portability, facilitated by laptop sized ultrasound machines.

Disadvantage:
• Poor detail – low resolution image (so we need a well trained sonographer to interpret the images
that are produced with ultrasound.

Medical diagnosis:
Ultrasound can be used to scan any part of the body as it can produce images of soft tissues without
damaging cells. As a moving image can be produce from ultrasound, it can be used to measure the speed of
blood flow around the body.

Medical treatment:
Ultrasound can be used to break down kidney stones that may form in the body. The ultrasound waves pass
through soft tissues and into the hard stone, vibrating it into small pieces. The deposit can then be removed
more easily than with invasive methods such as surgery.

Cleaning:
The high frequency of ultrasound means that the vibrations produced can be used to blast dirt off delicate
objects, such as antiques – it can used to clean dirty teeth.

Ultrasound in Industry
 In industry, ultrasound can be used to:

o Check for cracks inside metal objects

o Generate images beneath surfaces
 A crack in a metal block will cause some waves to reflect earlier than the rest, so will show up as
pulses on an oscilloscope trace
o Each pulse represents each time the wave crosses a boundary
 The speed of the waves is constant, so measuring the time between emission and detection can
allow the distance from the source to be calculated