Abstract
For nearly 50years, piezoelectric ceramics (primarily from the PZT family) have been the materials of choice as the active elements in underwater electroacoustic sound projectors. There is currently great interest in the materials science community for the consideration of newly discovered single crystal relaxor ferroelectric compositions as a potential replacement in applications that utilize piezoelectric ceramics. One of the salient features of single crystal ferroelectrics is piezoelectric coefficients that are three to seven times greater than those found in PZT. Most of the single crystal data reported in the open literature, however, are for near static drive conditions. This paper reports on the acoustic performance of prototype underwater sound projectors built from single crystal materials and driven at high drive levels over the frequency range of 500Hz to 25kHz. It is shown that the single crystal-based projectors exhibit at least a 4dB higher source level as compared to identical PZT-based units. In addition, the volt-amp product required to produce 1W of acoustic output is approximately one-third as much. It has also been demonstrated that when driving either the PZT-based or single crystal projectors for 1–2h under high drive, no significant degradation in acoustic performance occurs.
Published Version
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