Parameter reproducibility of polypropylene ferroelectret transducers for air-coupled ultrasonic testing

The extremely low acoustic impedance of polypropylene ferroelectret combined with its piezoelectric properties makes this material suitable for construction of air-coupled ultrasonic transducers for non-destructive testing. For the fabrication of transducers with a stable quality, the reproducibility of their key parameters is of interest. The reproducibility was evaluated by means of (i) impedance spectroscopy and (ii) pulse-echo measurements. (i) Impedance spectroscopy was applied to identify the resonance frequency, the coupling factor and the acoustic impedance of several nominally identical transducers. (ii) Pulse-echo measurements yielded the signal form of these transducers. The variation of the signal amplitude measured with pulseecho technique was about 10 dB. A part of this variation comes from the deposition of transducer electrodes and another part from local variations of ferroelectret properties. The variation of the signal amplitude was caused by the observed variation of the coupling factor, which was also about 10 dB. The variation of the acoustic impedance was only about 1 dB, thus having no effect on the variation of the signal amplitude. These results indicate that the variability can be reduced by improving the control of electrode deposition and by optimizing the production technology affecting the reproducibility of material properties.