High-performance ultrasonic transducer based on PZT piezoelectric ceramic for high-temperature NDE

Piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers (PUT) are applied in a wide range of fields such as non-destructive evaluation (NDE), medical imaging and petroleum exploration, etc. Nevertheless, most PUTs cannot achieve high performance and high operating temperatures simultaneously because of the inverse correlation between piezoelectric property and operating temperature. In this paper, a high-performance ultrasonic transducer based on PZT-5A type piezoelectric ceramic (S35) for high-temperature NDE over 300 °C was proposed. Firstly, it is found that the d₃₃, k_p, and k_t of the S35 ceramic plate show great temperature stability from 50 °C to 300 °C, which is attributed to the stabilisation of the phase structure and no occurrence of obvious depolarization behavior before the Curie temperature. And then, a single-element PUT based on S35 was fabricated, and pulse-echo tests from 50 °C to 300 °C in confined heating environments were executed. The peak-to-peak value (V_pp) varies from 2.58 V to 0.753 V, which results from the increase of the permittivity of the piezoelectric element and the degradation of the acoustic contact, and the -6dB BW demonstrates excellent temperature stability with a variation less than 10%. These results indicate the great potential of this high-performance ultrasonic transducer for high-temperature NDE.