Time-frequency characterization in support of broadband sonar transducer design
Abstract
Commonly used in ultrasonic pulse imaging, wideband transducers are becoming more and more popular in sonar area in various areas of application where the time resolution is a paramount issue such as: estimation of time of flight, communication, high resolution imaging, impedance and attenuation measurements, fine echo analysis....While, for most ultrasonic transducers, the power involved is rather small (about ten watts), for sonar transducers the power may exceeds several tens of kilowatts. Thus, for power efficiency considerations, sonar transducers are conventionally designed, at a given frequency, to convert the energy of an electric source into the acoustic energy without paying much attention to the fine temporal structure of transducer response. This has been satisfactory as long as narrow band systems are involved but becomes a limitation for wideband systems.In this paper, we are interested in wideband high-power systems. We will show how time-frequency approach can be used from the early design stage up to full system characterisation.
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