Electrostatically Driven Airborne Ultrasound Transmitter with Fine Mesh Electrode

Abstract

This paper proposes a structure of airborne ultrasound transducer based on an electrostatic force with a back support mesh. The proposed transducer can be fabricated by laminating flexible materials. As the first step, we fabricated a prototype of a 6.4-mm-diameter circular transducer. In the experiments at 44 kHz, we obtained 55 % electro-acoustic energy conversion efficiency and 8.7 Pa sound pressure at 20 cm from the device. These basic properties suggest the feasibility of the flexible sheet-like airborne phased array usable in nonlinear acoustics applications.