ASA 124th Meeting New Orleans 1992 October

3aEAa9. Capacitive devices for the efficient transduction of ultrasonic fields in air.

D. W. Schindel

Dept. of Phys., Queen's Univ., Kingston, ON K7L 3N6, Canada

D. A. Hutchins

Warwick Univ., Coventry, England

Capacitive devices that are able to efficiently generate and detect ultrasonic fields in air have already been designed and manufactured. They consist of metallized insulating films resting upon rigid conducting backplates. In order to increase efficiency, the backplates must be roughened, providing a resonant air cushion behind the thin insulating films. Unfortunately, roughening by conventional mechanical means [D. W. Schindel and D. A. Hutchins, Proc. IEEE Symp. 1, 301--304 (1991)] will be shown to produce a transducer whose beam profile is highly nonuniform above several hundred kilohertz. Ways of overcoming this are being investigated, including the manufacture of backplates through irradiation of metals by high-intensity ultrasound and micromachining of silicon. The result of the characterization of such new transducers in terms of bandwidth, sensitivity and beam profiles will be given, along with a discussion of the versatility of air coupled transducers manufactured completely from integrated circuit processing techniques.