Silicon micromachined ultrasonic transducer with improved power transfer for cutting applications

This work presents a light and powerful silicon based ultrasonic micro-cutter. In order to achieve high cutting efficiency as well as good controllability when driven by commercially available control systems, important design parameters haven been identified. They have been verified by FEM-simulation as well as experiments via laser Doppler vibrometer measurements and cutting tests. The samples have been manufactured cost-effectively by microfabrication batch processing and their cutting ability has been successfully demonstrated on chicken tissue, while driven in a typical frequency range from 50 kHz to 100 kHz, generating tip displacements up to 36 μm_pp.