An equivalent circuit based electro-vibro-acoustic model of a cylindrical transducer array.

Abstract

Cylindrical transducer arrays are used in many applications such as SONAR, depth sounding, ultrasound imaging, etc. This study developed the equivalent circuit (EC)-based-model of a cylindrical array with theoretical acoustic coupling. The electro-mechanical-acoustic coupling impedance matrix was first constructed to determine the response of the array. The electrical and mechanical impedances of the individual transducers were obtained by the EC model. The acoustic radiation impedances were obtained by the theoretical model. The cylindrical array is modeled by coupling the EC model and acoustic radiation impedances. The acoustic transfer matrix was then constructed using the theoretical method to determine both the far-field and near-field acoustic responses. The characteristics of the transducer array were represented with the electrical admittance, velocity response as a function of the voltage, transmit voltage response, beam pattern, and normalized pressure curve. To verify the proposed model, the analysis results were successfully compared to those of the fully coupled finite element model. Due to its high accuracy and computational efficiency, the proposed EC-based-model is expected to be useful for the conceptual design stage, which requires frequent design changes.