High performance transducers are not available using today's ceramic piezoelectric materials. Single crystal materials have shown an order of magnitude improvement in the efficiency over ceramic materials. Lasergenics has recently demonstrated the growth of large, homogeneous single crystals of PZN. We will further improve on the growth of these crystals and then demonstrate with Fraunhofer USA that this material will greatly improve on the performance of medical transducers. We will demonstrate a thin and flexible composite transducer design developed by Fraunhofer USA using the single crystal piezoelectric material of Lasergenics. Such a transducer system would have wide application in many fields of medicine. A 2D sparse array will be developed in the Phase II program.
The successful completion of our proposed program will allow the development of flat and flexible transducers that could will have wide application in medical imaging and diagnostics because of the high resolution and efficiency they would exhibit.
