Loss effects on adhesively-bonded multilayer ultrasonic transducers by self-heating

Multilayer ultrasonic transducers are widely being used for high power applications. In these applications, typical Langevin/Tonpilz structures without any adhesive bondings however have the disadvantage of limited bandwidth. Therefore adhesively-bonded structures are still a potential solution for this issue. In this paper, two-layer piezoelectric ceramic ultrasonic transducers with two different adhesive bondlines were investigated comparing to a single-layer transducer in terms of loss effects during operation with excitation signals sufficient to cause self-heating. The theoretical functions fitted to the measured time-temperature dependency data are compared with experimental results of different piezoelectric transducers. Theoretical analysis of loss characteristics at various surface displacements and the relationship with increasing temperature are reported. The effects of self-heating on the practical performance of multilayer ultrasonic transducers with adhesive bondlines are discussed. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.