The extremely low acoustic impedance of polypropylene ferroelectret combined with its piezoelectric properties makes this material suitable for construction of aircoupled ultrasonic transducers for non-destructive testing. For the fabrication of transducers with a stable quality, the reproducibility of their key parameters is of interest.
The reproducibility was evaluated by means of (i) impedance spectroscopy and (ii) pulse-echo measurements. (i) Impedance spectroscopy was applied to identify the resonance frequency, the coupling factor and the acoustic impedance of several nominally identical transducers. (ii) Pulse-echo measurements yielded the signal form of these transducers.
The variation of the signal amplitude measured with pulseecho technique was about 10 dB. A part of this variation Comes from the deposition of transducer electrodes and another part from local variations of ferroelectret properties. The variation of the signal amplitude was caused by the observed variation of the coupling factor, which was also about 10 dB. The variation of the acoustic impedance was only about 1 dB, thus having no effect on the variation of the signal amplitude.
These results indicate that the variability can be reduced by improving the control of electrode deposition and by optimizing the production technology affecting the reproducibility of material properties.
Novel air-coupled ultrasonic transducer combining the thermoacoustic with the piezoelectric effect
(2016)
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.