Tunable interdigital transducers made of piezoelectric macro-fiber composite

The number of applications of Lamb waves (LWs) based structural health monitoring (SHM) has significantly increased in recent decades. The growth of interest results from several advantages of this diagnostic technique, that is, considerable mode selectivity and directivity that allow for the assessment of the technical condition of a monitored structure. Successful applications of LWs in the field of SHM stimulate continuous improvement of the transducers' design to enable capturing more reliable diagnostic data. The paper introduces a new type of transducer that may be used in the LWs based SHM systems, namely tunable-interdigital transducer (T-IDT) based on macro-fiber composites (MFC). The authors provide a short overview on different types of transducers that may be used in SHM applications, followed by a detailed description of the structure of proposed T-IDT. Finally, the results of numerical and experimental tests carried out employing the proposed transducer are discussed and compared to those obtained with a traditional IDT. (paper)