Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ULTRASONICS FERROELECTRICS AND FREQUENCY CONTROL
Volume 69, Issue 2, Pages 751-760Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TUFFC.2021.3121086
Keywords
Double-layer transducers; lead-free phased array; textured piezoelectric ceramic
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Funding
- National Key Research and Development Program of the Ministry of Science and Technology of China [2017YFC0109802]
- China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [BX 20490103]
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Substantial progress has been made in lead-free piezoelectric materials, but creating a medical imaging ultrasonic array transducer with a center frequency <3 MHz remains challenging. This study addressed the difficulties in fabricating large uniform lead-free materials and the electrical impedance mismatch by utilizing texture engineering and stacking piezoelectric-layer design. The resulting phased array transducer demonstrated comparable imaging quality to a commercial PZT-5H ceramic-based transducer, highlighting the practicality of using lead-free materials in medical imaging applications.
Substantial advancement has been made in recent years on lead-free piezoelectric materials, but up to date, it is still a challenge to make a true medical imaging ultrasonic array transducer with center frequency <3 MHz. There are two major obstacles: the difficulty of fabricating large enough uniform lead-free piezoelectric materials with high piezoelectric coefficient, and the severe electrical impedance mismatch of an array element to the imaging system due to the relatively low dielectric constant of lead-free materials compared to lead-based piezoelectric materials. We resolved these two issues by employing texture engineering and stacking piezoelectric-layer design, which allowed us to fabricate an 80 element phased array transducer with the center frequency of 2.9 MHz and a bandwidth >80% for human heart imaging. The high-quality lead-free (Ba0.95Ca0.05)(Ti0.94Zr0.06)O-3 textured ceramic plate has the size of 23 x 22 x 0.8$ mm(3) with the piezoelectric constant d(33) =570 pC/N. Phantom imaging and internal clinical human heart imaging demonstrated that this lead-free phased array can produce comparable imaging quality to that of a commercial PZT-5H ceramic-based phased array transducer, which demonstrated the practicality of using lead-free materials to replace PZT ceramics in phased array transducers for medical imaging applications.
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