A study on airborne piezoelectric transducer for geological simulation

In this work, we report a new application of airborne piezoelectric transducer for ultrasonic seismic physical modeling technology. In the lab, we can obtain the internal structure of geologic model by analyzing the received echo signals which were launched by airborne ultrasonic transducer. Here we use different piezoelectric materials and matching layers to design and manufacture airborne transducers. The piezoelectric materials are ferroelectric single crystals (PMNT), 1-3 composites with volume fraction of 60% and 15% respectively. Using membranes as matching layers can improve more than 20 dB in two-way insertion loss which is a good solution to acoustic match of airborne transducers. The experiments show that the airborne transducer made with 1-3 composites with volume fraction of 60% has the best bandwidth and sensitivity compared to the other two. The characteristics of its high sensitivity and broadband are very suitable for airborne transducers in geological simulation field.