Piezo-Polymer Transducers for Ultrasonic Imaging in Air

Lorenzo Capineri, Antonino S. Fiorillo, Leonardo Masotti, and Santina Rocchi

ABSTRACT Airborne polyvinylidenefluoride transducers have been designed for robotic applications in air. Characteristics of transducer prototypes are: working frequencies from 61kHz to 86 kHz, quality factor Q from 4 to 6, and two-way insertion loss of about 90 dB. The small dimension, the lightness, and the low-cost fabrication technology allow the development of arrays or matrices for ultrasonic imaging systems in air. In this work two different image reconstruction algorithms are proposed: the first carries out a combined spectral and aperture synthesis for detecting isolated scatterers with a spatial resolution of about 2mm; the second is based on an accurate ranging algorithm with sub-millimeter resolution at distances up to 50cm. Finally, this work's application to the reconstruction of three-dimensional object profiles is discussed.

1997 IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control 44:36-43

© 1997, by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. All rights reserved.

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