A Smart Eddy Current Sensor Dedicated to the Nondestructive Evaluation of Carbon Fibers Reinforced Polymers.

This paper propose a new concept of an eddy current (EC) multi-element sensor for the characterization of carbon fiber-reinforced polymers (CFRP) to evaluate the orientations of plies in CFRP and the order of their stacking. The main advantage of the new sensors is the flexible parametrization by electronical switching that reduces the effort for mechanical manipulation. The sensor response was calculated and proved by 3D finite element (FE) modeling. This sensor is dedicated to nondestructive testing (NDT) and can be an alternative for conventional mechanical rotating and rectangular sensors.

Sputter deposition of stress-controlled piezoelectric AlN and AlScN films for ultrasonic and energy harvesting applications.

This paper reports on the deposition and characterization of piezoelectric AlN and AlXSc1-XN layers. Characterization methods include XRD, SEM, active thermo probe, pulse echo, and piezometer measurements. A special focus is on the characterization of AlN regarding the mechanical stress in the films. The stress in the films changed between -2.2 GPa (compressive) and 0.2 GPa (tensile) and showed a significant dependence on film thickness. The cause of this behavior is presumed to be the different mean grain sizes at different film thicknesses, with bigger mean grain sizes at higher thicknesses. Other influences on film stress such as the sputter pressure or the pulse mode are presented. The deposition of gradient layers using those influences allowed the adjustment of film stress while retaining the piezoelectric properties.

Optimization of electrode size for aluminum-nitride matrix ultrasonic transducers in the frequency range above 200 MHz.

This paper describes an optimization method of the top electrode size for a thin film matrix ultrasonic transducer (M-UT) in the frequency range above 200 MHz. The goal of this work is to design an optimal top electrode size for an M-UT providing the maximal output peak-peak voltage (V(PP)) and the maximal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) without additional electrical impedance matching. In order to reduce the complexity of the M-UT with more than 1000 elements, an intrinsic matching by electrode size variation is necessary. However, the size of a single element top electrode for an M-UT is related to the number of elements within a targeted sensor area, V(PP) and SNR of the transducer. In this paper, varying the active area of the top electrode from 0.09 to 25 mm(2) shows that for an Al-AlN-Al on silicon wafer configuration connected with a JSR Ultrasonics pulser/receiver (50 ohms), the optimal electrode size is 1 mm(2). With the optimal size electrode, the maximum output V(PP) of 0.08 V and the SNR of 42.93 dB are achieved at the resonance frequency of 225 MHz, and the bandwidth is 16.21 MHz.