Phase I will demonstrate the feasibility of fabricating medical ultrasonic transducers from a molded composite material of PZT pillars embedded in a polymer. The material has superior properties to the current material made by """"""""dice and fill"""""""". The proposed techniques would lead to reductions in costs and production times of array transducers. The methods proposed are applicable to single elements and arrays. The production of a commercially useful 1.75D phased array with 320 elements is proposed as a milestone for Phase I. The team's background and tooling will allow development of PZT powder doping, sintering and densification, micro molding of shapes, modeling of piezo characteristics in FEA, beam modeling, measurement and image quality analysis. Precisely molded composite materials provide the opportunity to economically construct stacks in array transducers. The team will design, build and extensively test stacks of array sections. The stacks are anticipated to be four differing height layers tuned to create an extremely wide bandwidth device. Transducers for a specific application could be designed and manufactured from a list of prefabricated materials that the team will characterize. A collection of modeling programs would be integrated with the materials to allow researchers access to low cost high performance transducers with rapid delivery.
