Naval Device Applications of Relaxor Piezoelectric Single Crystals

Planned Wide Aperture Array (WAA) sonar sensors for submarines are neutrally buoyant accelerometers embedded in a compliant hull coating that sense the particle motion of a target signal as it passes through the coating. Existing designs of sensors using conventional piezoelectric ceramic materials are designed to operate in the bandwidth of legacy WAA systems. Single crystal materials, due to their enormous bandwidth and high sensitivity offer the possibility of providing WAA sensors that are dramatically smaller in size and which will have ultra wide bandwidth. This project proposes to design and demonstrate the feasibility of such a ultra wide bandwidth sensor using newly developed single crystal material with improved performance and manufacturability.