Design of a Low Frequency Barrel Stave Underwater Transducer

Barrel-Stave transducers belong to one of the several classes of Flextensional Transducers, which make use of the flexural vibrations of shells to produce underwater sound. These shells, in turn, are excited by a stack of piezoelectric ceramic rings. The dynamics of barrel-stave transducers are rather complicated and are not easily amenable to analytical treatment. Therefore, design of barrel-stave transducers mostly depend on Finite Element (FE) Methods. In this work, design of a 1 kHz barrel-stave transducer is described. Commercial FE package ATILA is used for modeling the transducer. It is known that the resonance frequencies of this type of transducers depend dominantly on the resonance of the shell. Since the allowable dimensions of shell are decided by the constraints of application, bringing shell frequency down to 1 kHz was achieved by providing several slots on the shell. The driving mechanism consists of a stack of piezoelectric ceramic rings, fitted along the axis of the transducer. Transmitting Voltage Response (TVR) plot of the transducer is generated from the model and it shows a peak value of 130 dB ref μPa/V at l m, at resonance.