A unidirectional SH wave transducer based on phase-controlled antiparallel thickness-shear (d15) piezoelectric strips

Abstract

In recent years, shear horizontal (SH) waves are being paid more and more attention to in structural health monitoring as it has only one displacement component. In this paper, a unidirectional SH wave transducer based on phase-controlled antiparallel thickness-shear (d15) piezoelectric strips (APS) is proposed. Here two pairs of identical APS were used each of which is a bidirectional SH wave transducer. By setting the interval between the two pairs of APS as 1/4 wavelength and the excitation delay between them as 1/4 period of the central operating frequency, unidirectional SH waves can be excited. Both finite element simulations and experiments were performed to validate the proposed design. Results show that SH0 waves were successfully excited only along one direction and those along the unwanted directions were suppressed very well. The proposed unidirectional SH wave transducer is very helpful to study the fundamentals and applications of SH waves.