The use of piezoelectric film and ultrasound resonance to determine the complete elastic tensor in one measurement.

Abstract

The ultrasonic and elastic properties of materials are conventionally measured using quartz, lithium niobate, etc., transducers and a pulse-echo technique with the transducer driven at resonance. Problems with the technique include transducer ringing, transducer-sample coupling, parallelism of sample faces, beam diffraction, and the necessity of remounting transducers in order to measure all of the elastic constants. Usually, these problems can be minimized, but with samples that are only a fraction of a millimeter in size, conventional ultrasound measurements become difficult if not impossible. However, nearly all of these problems may be avoided if a resonance technique is used, and all of the elastic constants may be determined with a single measurement. For the broadband response and minimum transducer loading required for a resonance measurement in a small sample, polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) piezoelectric film (as thin as 9 microns) is ideally suitable.