Materials and Device Modeling to Reduce Cost and Time to Exploit Relaxor Piezoelectric Single Crystals in Navy SONAR Transducers

This SBIR proposal addresses the need for a transducer design methodology to reduce the cost and time for inserting into Navy systems innovative transducers based on relaxor piezoelectric single crystals. Together with the proposal submitted in response to N08-063, it forms a coordinated program that integrates the efforts, interests and areas of expertise of sonar system designers, transducer designers and materials developers. While the N08-063 proposal offers a moderate fidelity toolkit that enables the system designer to explore the transducer design space, the N08-061 proposal described herein provides the infrastructure for high fidelity materials and device modeling designed to reduce or eliminate the costly design/build/test cycles. The Phase I effort will focus on the Tonpilz transducer, commonly used in sonar array designs. We will develop a user friendly high fidelity Tonpilz model and validate the model by building and testing an exemplar device composed of single crystal. To represent a real Navy sonar problem, the exemplar device will be based on the PZT design currently used submarines. A comparison between the legacy and the new single crystal design will be made.