TY - JOUR A1 - Gaal, Mate A1 - Caldeira, Rui A1 - Bartusch, Jürgen A1 - Schadow, Florian A1 - Vössing, Konrad A1 - Kupnik, M. T1 - Air-coupled ultrasonic ferroelectret receiver with additional bias voltage N2 - High sensitivity is an important requirement for air-coupled ultrasonic sensors applied to materials testing. With a lower acoustic impedance than any piezoelectric material, charged cellular polypropylene (PP) offers better matching to air with a similar piezoelectric coefficient. The piezoelectric properties of charged cellular PP originate from their polarization, creating permanent internal voltage. The sensitivity of the sensor can be increased by applying additional dc bias voltage, as it has been done already for transmitters. This work presents the first ultrasonic sensor based on charged cellular PP including a high-voltage module providing dc bias voltage up to 2 kV. This bias voltage led to an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio of up to 15 ± 1 dB. The measurement of the received signal depending on the applied bias voltage is proposed as a new method of determining the internal voltage of ferroelectrets. The sensor combined with a cellular PP transmitter was applied to nondestructive testing of a rotor blade segment and glued-laminated timber, enabling imaging of the internal structure of these specimens with a thickness around 4 cm. KW - Acoustic sensors KW - Ferroelectret KW - Nondestructive testing KW - Ultrasonic imaging KW - Ultrasonic transducers PY - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/TUFFC.2019.2925666 SN - 0885-3010 SN - 1525-8955 VL - 66 IS - 10 SP - 1600 EP - 1605 PB - IEEE AN - OPUS4-49131 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -