SPICE Modeling of a High-Power Terfenol-D Transducer Considering Losses and Magnetic Flux Leakage

Of great importance is modeling for transducer design and application to predict its performance and simulate key characteristics. The equivalent circuit modeling (ECM), one of the most powerful tools, has been widely used in the transducer industry and academia due to its outstanding merits of low simulation cost and easy usage for multi-field simulation in both time and frequency domains. Nevertheless, most of the existing equivalent circuit models for Terfenol-D transducers normally ignore three material losses, namely elastic loss, piezomagnetic loss, and magnetic loss. Additionally, the magnetic leakage due to the intrinsic poor magnetic permeability of Terfenol-D is rarely considered into the piezomagnetic coupling. Both loss effects will produce substantial errors. Therefore, an improved SPICE model for a high-power Terfenol-D transducer considering the aforementioned three losses and magnetic flux leakage (MFL) is proposed in this article, which is implemented on the platform of LTspice software. To verify the usefulness and effectiveness of the proposed technique, a high-power Terfenol-D tonpilz transducer prototype with a resonance frequency of around 1 kHz and a maximum transmitting current response (TCR) of 187.1 dB(/)1A/mu Pa is built and tested. The experimental results, both in the air and water of the transducer, are in excellent agreement with the simulated results, which well validates our proposed modeling methods.

Automated summary

Modeling is crucial for predicting and simulating the performance of transducer design. The equivalent circuit modeling (ECM) is a powerful tool but existing models for Terfenol-D transducers often ignore material losses and magnetic flux leakage. This article proposes an improved SPICE model that considers these factors and validates its effectiveness with experimental results.