Developing a thermoacoustic sensor adaptive to ambient temperatures

In this paper, a simple and adaptive thermoacoustic sensor was designed to measure Low Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound (LIPUS). Compared to other thermoacoustic sensor designs, our novelty lies in (i) integrating an ultrasound medium layer during the measurement to simplify the complicated set-up procedures and (ii) taking the effect of ambient temperatures into design consideration. After measuring temperature increases with various ambient temperatures under different ultrasound intensities, a relationship among ultrasound intensities, ambient temperatures and coefficients of temporal temperature changes was calculated. Our improved design has made the sensor easy to operate and its performance more accurate and consistent than the thermoacoustic sensor designs without considering ambient temperatures. In all, our improved design greatly enhances the thermoacoustic sensor in practical ultrasound calibration.