Innovations in piezoelectric materials for ultrasound transducers

Piezoelectric material lie at the heart of ultrasonic transducers. Recent advances in materials development include submicron piezoelectric ceramics (PZT) which lead to improvements in feature size, i.e. aspect ratio, element width, etc., for linear arrays and high frequency transducers. In contrast to fine grain ceramics, single crystal materials based on Relaxor-PT ferroelectrics offer electromechanical coupling coefficients > 90 percent with a range of dielectric permittivity allowing flexibility in transducer engineering in regard to electrical impedance matching. Using KLM modeling, very high bandwidth performance > 120 percent is projected. Specific examples of high frequency 1-3 composites and 1D linear array transducers fabricated from new piezoelectric materials, including sol-gel derived PZT fibers, are presented.© (1998) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.