Developing and Testing Phased

Array Ultrasonic Transducers

An Application of Statistical Inversion Problem

• Commercial applications have been developed

by the Invers Oy company in Sodankylä with the
first product being a new kind of synthetic
aperture sonar for riverbottom topography
profiling.

• This system is based on a well-formulated

mathematical model of the scattering process
and is the first known full-scale synthetic
aperture sonar in practise.
Rovaniemi Polytech contribution of
Sonar
• We are developing Phased Array type
Ultrasonic Transducers, which replaces
the original expensive U.S. made
custom design Pietzo Transducers. Two
demanding details exist:

Acoustic impedance matching between Piezo Ceramic

Resonator and Water

• Optimizing The Radiation pattern of Piezo Array

Structure of The Synthetic aperture
Transmitter/Receiver
Actual Assembly of Sonar in a Boat
Visualization of the Interferogram, Deepnes
and Intensity measurements
Example of River Bank deepnes Map
A User Interface of Sonar
Example of Radiation pattern of multi-wave lenght
wide diameter circular piezo trancducer

Pääkeilan kulman
puolikas

Far Field intensity of round cylinder radiator

2 J1 k a sin    
2
k a
p  z    p 0 
2 z k a sin   
 How to design acoustic Arrays
• Aperture theory states that observed radiation
(or sensitivity) pattern is the square of the
Hankel transform of the convolution of the
source and aperture functions. This is nice but…
• Computers are powerfull for number crunching.
10^9 Floating point operations takes only few
seconds.
• Mr.Hygens lived 200 years before Mr.Hankel.
Hygens principle is very straitforward to apply
numerically.
 Predicting of the Trancducer Array
Radiation pattern
• Brute force method was implemented
• Direct apply of Huygens principle by numerical
means
• No Far field approximation is necessary.
• Trancducer obey Reciprocal principle. The same
analysis is valid for Receiver sensivity pattern
 Numerical calculation of the
trancducer radiation pattern
TX-Rx
(x,y)
R0 Piezo Array
y
Image
Plane
Rn
x
Area

i    t   R n  x  y 

1
Intens ( x  y ) e
Rn
Area
 Elliptical Resonator. Cross section
of Y direction (Narrow)
3
1500
1.27510
1350
1200
1050
900
Amp ( x y ) 750
600
450
300
150
0 0
6 4.8 3.6 2.4 1.2 0 1.2 2.4 3.6 4.8 6
5 y 5
 Elliptical Resonator. Crosscut of X
direction (wide)
3
1500
1.27510
1350
1200
1050
900
Amp ( x y ) 750
600
450
300
150
0 0
6 4.8 3.6 2.4 1.2 0 1.2 2.4 3.6 4.8 6
5 x 5
Analysis of a Commerial four element Piezo
pattern. Four elements. Y - crosscut

vaihe  korkeus 
i i
0
0 deg 25 mm 1
0 deg 15 mm  
Amp   
0 deg 5 mm 1 Sarake  0
0 deg 5 mm 1
0 deg 15 mm 1
0 deg 25 mm  
0
Lineaarinen asteikko
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Intens( y )
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10
y
Improved version. Six radiator
elements
vaihe  korkeus 
i i
1
0 deg 25 mm 1
0 deg 15 mm  
Amp   
0 deg 5 mm 1 Sarake  1
0 deg 5 mm 1
0 deg 15 mm 1
0 deg 25 mm  
1
Lineaarinen asteikko
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Intens( y )
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10
y
Final version. Side Lobes eliminated

vaihe  korkeus 
i i
1
0 deg 25 mm 2
0 deg 15 mm  
Amp   
0 deg 5 mm 3 Sarake  3
0 deg 5 mm 3
0 deg 15 mm 2
0 deg 25 mm  
1
Lineaarinen asteikko
1
0.9
0.8
0.7
0.6
Intens( y )
0.5
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.1
0
10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10
y
 dB Scaled intensity crosscut
dB-asteikko
0 0
6
12
18
24
20 log( Intens( y ) )
30
36
42
48

 60 54
60
10 8 6 4 2 0 2 4 6 8 10
 10 y 10
An early test setup. Two different type
material molded in Epoxy resin
 Acusto-electrical coupling model of
Transmitter-Receiver equivalent circuit
Non-optimized TX-RX combination
15mV

10mV

5mV

0V
80KHz 90KHz 100KHz 110KHz 120KHz 130KHz 140KHz 150KHz
V(R3:2)
Frequency
 Matched response, 8 dB
improvement of sensitivity
40mV

30mV

20mV

10mV

0V
80KHz 90KHz 100KHz 110KHz 120KHz 130KHz 140KHz 150KHz
V(R3:2)
Frequency
Time domain simulation of a burst
4.0V

2.0V

0V

-2.0V

-4.0V
0s 50us 100us 150us 200us 250us 300us
V(R3:2)
Time
Burst response after optimizing
8.0V

4.0V

0V

-4.0V

-8.0V
0s 50us 100us 150us 200us 250us 300us
V(R3:2)
Time
 Modelling of acoustic Impedance matching
layers with transmission line analog circuits
Magnesium and Epoxy
R1 T1 T2 R2

32 1.48
V1 V
9.3V
Z0 = 10 Z0 = 3.1
TD = 2.13675u TD = 2.13675u

0 0 0 0 0 0
Epoxy
R3 T3 R4

32 1.48
V2 Ideal V
9.3V
Z0 = 3.1
TD = 2.13675u

0 0 0 0

Ideal
R30 T30 R50

32 1.48
V80 V
9.3V
Z0 = 6.881860214
TD = 2.13675u

0 0 0 0
 Matching of Acoustic impedance
between piezo ceramics and water
Simulation results of Trancducer with two Quarter-
Lamda matching Layers