Homogenized electromechanical coefficients and effective parameters of 1–3 piezocomposites for ultrasound imaging transducers

Highlights: • Connectivity of piezoelectric composite materials. • Effective acoustic properties of piezocomposite. • Electroacoustic response calculation using the KLM model. • Elaboration of a biomedical ultrasound imaging transducer. • Optimization following the specifications of an end-user performance index. Analytical models can be useful tools to develop efficient transducers dedicated to a specific application field. This work proposes a homogenization technique for establishing the effective coefficients and parameters of 1-3 piezocomposite whose both phases are piezoelectrically active. Such piezocomposite materials may have homogenized electromechanical properties resulting from positive hybrid effect. A numerical simulation of the effective parameters resulting from a PZT-5A / PVDF-TrFE composition shows that, volume fraction influences significantly on the properties of the piezocomposite and consequently on its behaviour in service. As an end-user application for ultrasound imaging, those piezocomposite materials are effectively integrated in a piezocomposite transducer, coupled with a dedicated backing. The resulting characteristics in terms of impulse response and associated electroacoustic echo are compared and discussed for typical configurations. A method for the optimization of the design of such piezocomposite transducer is presented. Specific estimators based on the bandwidth flatness BWF and bandwidth amplitude product BWA are proposed as stable and smooth criteria for an optimization procedure.