TY - CONF A1 - Gaal, Mate A1 - Daschewski, Maxim A1 - Bartusch, Jürgen A1 - Schadow, Florian A1 - Dohse, Elmar A1 - Kreutzbruck, Marc A1 - Weise, Matthias A1 - Beck, Uwe T1 - Novel air-coupled ultrasonic transducer combining the thermoacoustic with the piezoelectric effect T2 - Proceedings of WCNDT 2016 N2 - In recent years, there has been an increasing industrial demand for one-sided inspection of various structures by means of air-coupled ultrasonic technique. Lightweight structures based on carbon-fibre-reinforced polymers may have very complex shapes, making air-coupled transmission difficult or even impossible. The inspection of concrete structures is another example where one-sided inspection is required. To address these challenges a new type of transducer for air-coupled pulse-echo inspection was developed, which unites two principles: thermoacoustic emission and piezoelectric reception. The thermoacoustic emitter is a titanium electrode with a thickness of several tens of nanometer. This electrode was deposited onto charged cellular polypropylene, which serves as a piezoelectric receiver. The thermoacoustic transmission is based on a transformation of the thermal energy of an electrically heated electrode into the acoustic energy of an ultrasonic wave. Thermoacoustic emitters provide resonance-free behaviour and thus extremely broadband pulses. Charged cellular polypropylene is piezoelectric due to the polarization of its cells and it is well matched to air, with a Young modulus in the order of magnitude of MPa. In this contribution we present some pulse-echo measurements with the first prototypes of the combined thermoacoustic-piezoelectric transducer. T2 - World Conference of Non-Destructive Testing CY - Munich, Germany DA - 13.6.2016 KW - Thermoacoustic KW - Piezoelectric KW - Ultrasonic transducer KW - Ferroelectret PY - 2016 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-bam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/36715 AN - OPUS4-36715 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:kobv:b43-367151 VL - 158 SP - Mo.1.F.4, 1 EP - 6 AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany