• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.122-129
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• 2009

Recently much attention has been paid to a guided wave due to its effective applicability to long range and fast inspection of structures. In guided wave based NDE, the appropriate selection of wave modes is one of important factors since the test performance is highly dependent on which mode of guided waves is employed. As far as plate-like structures are concerned, so far, SH guided wave has not been frequently applied compared to Lamb waves, which is mostly caused by the lack of proper and convenient transducers to generate and measure the SH waves. In this investigation, a new small-sized SH guided wave transducer based on magnetostriction is proposed. The present transducer was designed to be modular and be used with shear couplant to avoid the inconvenience of the existing magnetostrictive patch transducers, which comprises the ferromagnetic patch tightly bonded to a structure. The wave transduction mechanism and the detailed configuration of the present transducer are presented. Experimental verification is also conducted on test specimens and the results confirm the good performance of the present transducer module.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.34 no.4
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• pp.264-273
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• 2015

Improvement of the radiation beam profile of a medical ultrasonic transducer has been researched in this paper. In order to improve the beam profile, a new transducer structure has been devised that includes both a shaded electrode and a multi-focus lens. For a linear sound source, the beam profile was investigated through finite element analysis, and then the optimal design of the devised structure was carried out by considering such performances as sidelobe level, focal range and beamwidth simultaneously. In the process, the optimal dimension of the devised structure was derived by using the ratio of the focal range to the minimum beamwidth as a performance index. As a result, the beam profile has been improved to have a lower sidelobe level at -20.2 dB and a consistent narrow beamwidth from 30 mm to 160 mm depth with the minimum beamwidth at 2.04 mm. Further, a prototype transducer was fabricated to have the devised structure, and its performance was measured and compared with the analysis results to confirm the validity of the devised transducer structure.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.69-76
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• 2000

In this research, with the FEM we analyzed the variation of the sound pressure and thermal distribution of a Class IV Flextensional transducer in relation to its material properties and structures. Based on the results, we determined optimal structure of a Class IV Flextensional transducer that had maximum sound pressure, minimum thermal distribution, and 1 kHz resonance frequency. The sound pressure by the optimal structure is higher than that of the basic structure by two times, and the thermal distribution is much lower. Results of the present work can be utilized to design Class IV Flextensional transducers of various resonance frequency, maximum sound pressure, and minimum thermal distribution.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.502-508
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• 2013

In this paper, 2D array transducers using a conductive backer similar to 1-3 composites have been designed, fabricated, and evaluated. The conductive backer was based on well known manufacturing process of 1-3 composites with affordable ingredients. The 2D array transducer had 4,096 elements designed to have 3.5 MHz center frequency and a fractional bandwidth over 60 %. Fabricated prototype of the transducer satisfied the specifications in the center frequency and bandwidth. Performance over the entire elements was so uniform that the standard deviation was less than 0.81 dB. Thus applicability of the conductive backer proposed in this work to 2D array transducers was verified.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2006.05a
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• pp.817-820
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• 2006

The Tonpilz transducer is one of the essential elements in active sonar application. The characteristics of transducer depend on the piezoelectric ceramics and mechanical elements such as head mass, tail mass, pre-stress rod and so on. One of the important characteristics is electric and mechanical stability of transducer for long term high power transmitting operation. This parer presents the results about long term endurance tests of the underwater acoustic transducer.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.19 no.7
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• pp.85-89
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• 2000

In this paper, by extending the previously developed self- and mutual-radiation impedance calculation method for a regular-square vibrating surface by using numerical series, we proposed a method to obtain the self-radiation impedance of a rectangular transducer with an arbitrary integer ratio of the length to width. The proposed method exhibits high accuracy and a short computation time. After investigating the accuracy and computation time as the number of elements changes, we have calculated the self-radiation impedance of several rectangular transducers, and compared the results with those in the literature.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.15 no.4
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• pp.77-82
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• 1996

In this paper an identification method is presented to obtain the equivalent electric model of a sandwitch type piezoelectric transducer. Unknown parameters related to the equivalent circuit are identified by solving a nonlinear optimization problem which can minimize an error between the experimental and analytical admittances in air. The proposed method is applied to an example transducer. The validity of equivalent circuit model is demonstrated by the comparison between the experimental measurements and analytical calculations of transmitting voltage response(TVR) and receiving voltage response(RVS).

• Journal of the Korean Society for Nondestructive Testing
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• v.29 no.5
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• pp.427-435
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• 2009

Cylindrical structures such as pipes and shafts are widely used in various industrial facilities. Recently, researches on magnetostrictive transduction of torsional waves have been actively reported for the nondestructive evaluation of those cylindrical structures. However, the existing magnetostrictive patch transducer has somewhat inconvenient and time.consuming process like patch bonding to a structure since it should employ a magnetostrictive patch having strong magnetostriction. To overcome these limitations of the existing transducer, in this work, we develop a novel modular magnetostrictive transducer to generate and measure torsional waves to inspect a cylindrical structure. The proposed transducer can be applied as viscous liquid coupling with shear couplant or dry coupling without coupling media instead of patch bonding to a structure. We describe a detailed structure of the modular transducer and conduct some experiments to verify its performance.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.344-352
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• 2011

In this paper, the resonant characteristic of a Tonpilz transducer with a fixed tail mass has been studied by means of an equivalent circuit approach. An equivalent circuit has been designed to describe the characteristic of a Tonpilz transducer that has an additional resonance because of its fixed tail mass. The transmitting voltage response of the transducer calculated by the designed circuit has been compared with that by the FEA (finite element analysis) to confirm the validity of the circuit. This equivalent circuit approach produces identical results with the FEA, in which the variation of resonant frequencies and TVR has been clearly figured out in relation to the stiffness of the mounting fixture and the mass of the tail mass. The suggested equivalent circuit can be utilized to figure out the characteristics of the Tonpilz transducer more efficiently than FEA that requires much calculation time and revision of the models in accordance with the variation of design variables.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2005.11a
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• pp.244-246
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• 2005

The Tonpiltz transducer is one of the essential elements in sonar application. The characteristics of transducer depend on the piezoelectric ceramics and mechanical elements such as head mass, tail mass, pre-stress rod and so on. One of the important characteristics is stable electric resistance for high power transmitting operation. This paper presents characteristics variation of the underwater acoustic transducer with material variation of electric decoupler.