User Toolkit for Reducing Cost and Time in the Design of SONAR Systems Using Relaxor Piezoelectric Single Crystals

WAI will develop a suite of User Toolkits for SONAR Transducer Design, to enable rapid and accurate evaluation of new design concepts, allowing quick selection of appropriate candidate designs for further evaluation. This will reduce overall design costs and time from concept to market. The Toolkits will be heavily influenced by devices incorporating single crystal piezoelectric materials. The technology for the simulation used in the Toolkits will be based on PZFlex, a finite element simulation package heavily used in the ultrasound and SONAR communities, leveraging decades of development effort in that field. The Toolkits will allow for all relevant input parameters (materials, dimensions etc) to be varied, while calculating and displaying all key output metrics such as electrical impedance profile, TVR, and directivity. WAI, in partnership with Materils systems Inc, will initially develop a Toolkit focused on the Langevin (sandwich) class of transducer, for consideration for use in the AN/AQS-20 Minehunter. Following development and validation of the Toolkit, MSI will design a candidate Forward Looking SONAR with the Toolkit, incorporating single crystal piezoelectric material, to replace the existing Tonpilz design. Key performance metrics will be compared with existing data to highlight improvements available from use of new design and materials.