Single crystal cylinder transducers for sonar applications

A segmented cylinder transducer constructed of single crystal lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate (PMN-PT) has been under development at NUWC and EDO Corporation for several years. The purpose of this development was to provide an extremely compact, high power broadband source. By virtue of their extraordinary material properties, ferroelectric single crystals are the ideal transduction material for developing such compact broadband systems. This presentation shall review the evolution of the transducer design as well as present the results of a successful in-water test conducted at NUWC in October of 2003. It shall be shown that design changes intended to eliminate spurious modes limiting the transducer bandwidth first observed in 2002 were successful, resulting in a transducer with a clean frequency response and an effective coupling factor of 0.85. The measured transducer admittance was in nearly exact agreement with theoretical predictions. The NUWC in-water tests demonstrated that the single crystal cylinder achieved an admittance bandwidth (based on the Stansfield criterion) of over 100%, while the tuned power factor was 0.8 or more over 2.5 octaves of frequency. Additionally, the transducer produced 12 dB higher source levels than a similarly sized PZT transducer. [Work sponsored by DARPA.]