Preparation and Characterization of Lead Titanate and Lead Metaniobate Piezoceramics for Ultrasonic Transducer Design

The anisotropic electromechanical properties of lead titanate piezoceramics and the relatively weak acoustic impedance of lead metaniobate piezoceramics are attractive to design ultrasonic transducers. In this paper the process of preparation and the characterization of some of these materials are presented. The characterization which is considered is the determination of the resonance frequency dispersion diagrams of narrow parallelepipedic elements and the determination of the thickness and planar modes characteristics. Both kinds of characteristics are derived from the classical tensorial component characterization, the dispersion diagrams are derived by means of a finite-element method simulation. The characterizations of two piezoceramics of each type are presented. The results and the method are discussed and some comments on the application t o ultrasonic transducer design are included.