The Construction of a Piezoelectric Transducer for Sound Application in Liquid Steel

This paper concerns structural assumptions for a piezoceramic head for sound amplification of liquid steel in industrial conditions. The head in question is to replace magnetostrictive heads used in laboratory conditions exclusively. Sound amplification is assumed to improve the internal structure of steel. The head consists of a three-layer transducer, a stepping concentrator with an exponential notch, and a wave-guide finished with a replaceable bit submerged in liquid steel. In order to optimally insulate the piezoceramics in the transducer, being sensitive to temperature, a new method of calculating the passive layers was required to be developed so that the radiant layer was the thickest one (on maintenance of the preset frequency of resonant vibrations). This paper contains a description of the method of selecting thicknesses of the individual transducer layers which were experimentally verified by constructing a head prototype and its application for sound amplification of steel ingots of 130 kg of mass.