High Power Continuous Duty Transducers

This project addresses the need to develop a high power, continuous duty (or “continuous wave”, CW) underwater acoustic transducer. We believe that the Phase I program has established an important contribution to the heat analysis and evaluation of acoustic transducers. This aspect of transducer design has become more important with the advent of new continuous wave sonar systems and also with signal crystal transducers with their currently higher dissipation factors. We plan to not only extend the Phase I analytical model, but upgrade the FEA 2-D to a 3-D model and extend our modeling efforts to evaluate partial arrays or other transducers designs, including PZT and single crystal rings and Tonpilz transducers. The ProE FEA program model for thermal analysis will be extended to an ANSYS model allowing the electro mechanical model to be used directly as a thermal model without the need to rebuild the model. In addition to the analytical and FEA modeling as well as transducer evaluation of current models, new transducer designs with mitigated heat rise will be implemented.