ABSTRACT In hydrophone designs, intelligent use of structural effects is the key to obtaining high sensitivity. The uses of the moonie and spring structures are good examples of this approach. These transducers can be regarded as mechanical stress converters and amplifiers by which the hydropressure is transferred into a desired stress mode and amplified in magnitude for elastoelectric conversion. In this paper, a structure referred to as the w-membrane is introduced for hydrophone construction. By combining a cylindrical design with the w membrane structure, a hydrophone with very high sensitivity is designed. In addition, high capacitance is another advantage of this configuration. The analysis is carried out based on the concepts of stress conversion and amplification, and numerical results are presented.
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