Fabrication and Characterization of an Underwater Acoustic Tonpilz Vector Sensor for the Estimation of Sound Source Direction

Abstract

핵심용어: Tonpilz, 벡터 센서, 수중음향, 트랜스듀서, 압전세라믹, 방위각 ABSTRACT: Typical underwater acoustic transducers detect only the magnitude of an acoustic pressure and they have the limitation of not being able to recognize the direction of the sound signal. Hence, the authors of this paper proposed a new vector sensor structure based on Tonpilz transducers that could detect both the magnitude and the direction of a sound pressure. In the proposed structure, the piezoceramic ring was divided into four segments, and proper combination of the output voltages of the segments in response to the external sound pressure could provide the information on the orientation of the sound source. In this paper, a Tonpilz transducer has been fabricated to have the proposed structure and its characteristics has been measured to confirm the validity of the proposed structure.