Modeling and experimental study of transducers made with piezoelectric composite material

The topic of this work is the experimental and theoretical study of a cylindrical acoustic transducer made with a 1.3 piezoelectric composite material. This material consists in PZT ceramic rods embedded in a polymer matrix. A modeling of this ideal transversally periodic structure is proposed. It is based on a finite element approach derived from homogenization techniques mainly used for composite material studies. The analysis focuses on a representative unit cell with specific boundary conditions on the lateral surfaces taking accurately into account the periodicity of the structure. The first step proposed is the development of a tridimensional Fortran code especially adapted for this problem. It then allowed the set up of different non-redundant linear combinations of degrees of freedom that could be linked to the ANSYS FEM code allowing to progress toward the modeling of the complete problem. The motion of the faces of an experimental transducer vibrating in the quasi-static mode has been analyzed using Laser Doppler vibrometry technique. Experimental and modeling results are in good agreement and justify the proposed approach.