Integrating Materials Innovation into Ultrasonic Transducers for Underwater Sonar

Underwater sonar is the most important imaging technique for use underwater, finding applications in marine surveying, ocean monitoring, shipping navigation, and the defence and fishing industries, amongst others. The vast majority of sonar systems rely on transducers made with piezoelectric materials to generate and detect ultrasound signals to interrogate and gain knowledge of the marine environment. Innovation in ultrasonic transducer materials and structures has underpinned many of the performance improvements that have been achieved in the past 100 years.Examples in materials include: piezoceramics in the 1950s; piezocomposites in the 1990s; piezocrystals from 2000; a long-running effort in lead-free piezoelectrics; and rapid contemporary research and development in textured ceramics. However, the potential for innovation is often seen as in tension with established use of existing transducers, partly because of the long lifetime of such devices, and it therefore usually takes decades for the potential to be realised.

Sponsored by Thales UK, this PhD project, which will suit an engineer, physicist or material scientist, will study how such innovation can be characterised, understood and codified, with a particular aim to shorten the time to realise the potential of innovative materials and structures. It will do this through active exploration of incorporation of lead-free piezoelectrics and textured ceramics into representative transducers. This will exploit new material characterisation techniques and virtual prototyping across a range of software platforms implementing finite element analysis and simpler tools. The results will be documented technically and with regard to the procedures developed, including interaction with sonar transducer designers with different skill levels.