Compact Piezoelectric High Intensity Sound Source

Acoustic air purification systems could be an important technology for protection of buildings from terrorist biological threats. The current limitations of these systems (e.g. cost, size, and power consumption) are mainly due to the inadequacy of commercially available sound sources for this application. What is needed to move the technology forward are sound sources that provide a higher sound pressure level, compact size, lower power consumption, and low cost. In addition, these components need to be reliable for long periods of continuous operation in ambient conditions and must be uniform in performance from part-to-part and batch-to-batch. No such commercial sound sources exist in the marketplace today that meet all of these requirements. Omega will build upon the work from Phase I to develop and optimize innovative new sound sources for this application. The performance (SPL at a given size and power input), reliability, and uniformity of the new sound sources will be maximized by optimization of the design and materials in the sound source as well as the manufacturing process. Omega will quantitatively demonstrate improvement of these devices over the current commercial sound sources through electrical, acoustic, and air filtration measurements.