Acoustic waves have had widespread applications in fields as diverse as medicine and nondestructive evaluation of materials. Availability of extremely short pulses would be an attractive improvement for these uses. Standard microelectronics fabrication techniques of deposition photolithograph and etching may permit construction of acoustic sources on a planar structure. The laboratories available at Case Western Reserve University permit experimental construction of such structures. This research is both theoretical and experimental, with modeling and calculations predicting performance of the experimental planar piezoelectric transducers and arrays of such transducers. If successful, this research can provide design rules for creation of acoustic arrays of value for high resolution metrology.
