Design and analysis of a wide bandwidth immersion MEMS transducer array for fault detection in power cables

In this paper a 1-D micromachined-based transducer array is proposed for fault detection in high power transmission power cables. The proposed array benefits from silicon microfabrication techniques, and includes N = 101 capacitive micromachined cells that are located 5μm from each other. Transducer cells are actuated simultaneously, creating an acoustic wave that travels in the surrounding water domain. COMSOL acoustic simulations indicate that this array has a bandwidth of 7 MHz at -6 dB, resulting in a fractional bandwidth of BW/f₀ = 70%. This array generates a directive beam pattern with a beam width of 3° at the central frequency of f = 10 MHz, resulting in high-resolution fault detection.