• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.41 no.3
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• pp.278-286
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• 2022

In this study, a 33-mode Free-Flooded Ring (FFR) transducer was designed to apply piezoelectric single crystal PIN-PMN-PT, which has high piezoelectric constants and electromechanical coupling coefficient. To ensure low-frequency high transmitting sensitivity characteristics with a small size of FFR transducer, the commercial FFR transducer based on piezoelectric ceramics was compared. To develop the FFR transducer with broadband characteristics, a piezoelectric segmented ring structure inserted with inactive elements was applied. The oil-filled structure was applied to minimize the change of acoustic characteristics of the ring transducer. It was verified that the transmitting voltage response, underwater impedance, and beam pattern matched the finite element numerical simulation results well through an acoustic test. The difference in the transmitting voltage response between the measured and the simulated results is about 1.3 dB in cavity mode and about 0.3 dB in radial mode. The fabricated FFR transducer had a higher transmitting voltage response compared to the commercial transducer, but the diameter was reduced by about 17 %. From this study, it was confirmed that the feasibility of a single crystal-applied FFR transducer with compact size and high-power characteristics. The effectiveness of the performance prediction by simulation was also confirmed.