Excitation of fundamental shear horizontal wave by using face-shear (d36) piezoelectric ceramics

The fundamental shear horizontal (SH0) wave in plate-like structures is extremely useful for non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) as it is non-dispersive. However, currently, the SH0 wave is usually excited by electromagnetic acoustic transducers (EMAT) whose energy conversion efficiency is fairly low. The face-shear (d(36)) mode piezoelectrics is more promising for SH0 wave excitation, but this mode cannot appear in conventional piezoelectric ceramics. Recently, by modifying the symmetry of poled PbZr1-xTixO3 (PZT) ceramics via ferroelastic domain engineering, we realized the face-shear d(36) mode in both soft and hard PZT ceramics. In this work, we further improved the face-shear properties of PZT-4 and PZT-5H ceramics via lateral compression under elevated temperature. It was found that when bonded on a 1mm-thick aluminum plate, the d(36) type PZT-4 exhibited better face-shear performance than PZT-5H. We then successfully excite SH0 wave in the aluminum plate using a face-shear PZT-4 square patch and receive the wave using a face-shear 0.72[Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O-3]-0.28[PbTiO3] (PMN-PT) patch. The frequency response and directionality of the excited SH0 wave were also investigated. The SH0 wave can be dominated over the Lamb waves (S0 and A0 waves) from 160 kHz to 280 kHz. The wave amplitude reaches its maxima along the two main directions (0 degrees and 90 degrees). The amplitude can keep over 80% of the maxima when the deviate angle is less than 30 degrees, while it vanishes quickly at the 45 degrees direction. The excited SH0 wave using piezoelectric ceramics could be very promising in the fields of NDT and SHM. Published by AIP Publishing.