Polymeric capacitive transducers and arrays for gas coupled operation

This paper describes a facile approach for the manufacture of capacitive transducers based on micropatterning of polymer substrates. The process affords independent control of cavity depth, lateral dimensions and spatial distribution. The manufacture of air-coupled devices is guided by PZFlex modeling based on the range cavity dimension available from the method. Single element devices, operating at 500kHz, exhibit transducer bandwidths in excess of 100% and two-way insertion loss of 62dB being typical. Laser vibrometery confirms uniform surface dilation of the excited. PZFlex, configured with MPI parallelization scheme, has been used to assess linear array performance inter-element cross talk is minimal and observed to be 21dB.