Characterizing piezoceramic material using complex frequency excitation

This paper discusses a new technique to characterize lossy piezoelectric materials. This new method uses a complex frequency to stimulate a resonator's true resonant point. Parameters that are acquired from the characterization are the material attenuation constant, the impedance at the resonant frequency, an equivalent resistance for circuit modeling and an acoustic viscosity. Knowledge of this information can be very useful to circuit designers and material manufacturers. A nice feature of this technique is that it is easily implemented using and arbitrary waveform generator, a PC with data analysis/acquisition software and an oscilloscope.