Edge-Connected 2 Dimensional Array Composed of Nonlinear Acoustic Devices

We propose an alternative 2 Dimensional acoustical array transducer which enables one to generate an arbitrary transmitting beam with a very small number of signal channels. The array with N×M elements can be controlled by N+M signal channels by edge-connected array. In this paper, an edge-connected array composed of nonlinear acoustic devices such as electrostrictive transducers is proposed. Each element of our array can be controlled independently, in contrast to conventional edge-connected arrays. We adopted a spice model of an electrostrictive material (PMN-Pt) to evaluate the characteristics of the array. The performance of the single transducer and the ability of the edge-connected array to perform 3 dimensional imaging were demonstrated by SPICE simulation. In addition to simulation, we performed preliminary experiments using PMN-Pt as a test sample.