An Underwater Transducer Made of Flexible Piezoelectric Microdome Arrays

We present a flexible, lightweight, and high-performance transducer for underwater communication applications. In this work, a thin-film acoustic transducer with an array of microdomes is made of polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) film. Finite Element Method (FEM) was used to model the transducers and compared with experimental results. Pool trials show that the dome-shaped transducer maintains great performance in acoustic transmission especially in mid-to-high frequencies (from 80kHz to 200kHz), with peak sound pressure level (SPL) reaching 103 dB.