As an essential characteristic of air-coupled transducers, electrical impedance can provide valuable information for quality control during manufacturing of transducers. It is also found feasible to directly read the optimal operating frequency from the impedance plots when the resonance is independent of the others. However, the spurious resonance emerges when two neighboring resonances are closely spaced, resulting in distorted impedance and ambiguous optimal operating frequency. In this paper, the electrical impedance of air-coupled transducers with spurious resonance is modeled using the Butterworth-Van Dyke (BVD) equivalent circuit. Then model-based sensitivity analysis is performed to evaluate the mutual interference between adjacent resonances. Based on the analysis results, the prestress method is proposed to regulate and suppress the spurious resonance by adjusting the equivalent parameters of the BVD model. Experimental study was carried out on the response of the electrical impedance and the vibration velocity of the transducer with spurious resonance to pre-tightening force. The results show that the spurious resonance disappeared when the pre-tightening force was initially loaded. Moreover, the vibration velocity of two main resonance peaks increases about 45.6% and 33.9% as the pre-tightening torque increases to 0.25 N∙m. Hence it is validated that the proposed prestress method is efficient to suppress the spurious resonance and improve the transducers performance.
Keywords: air-coupled transducers; electrical impedance; equivalent model; pre-tightening force; spurious resonance; vibration velocity.