Textured piezoceramics is now of increasing interest to the underwater acoustic community due to their performance and/or cost benefits compared to conventional PZT and single crystals. Recent work at QorTek has shown the technology to increase source level and provide larger bandwidth relative to Type III PZT ceramics for specific designs. This enables form factor reductions and/or improved performance as to enable new design space for acoustic systems featuring enhanced target detection capability (potentially critical to quieter enemy submarines detection). It can enable longer operational life of power source limited systems (e.g., expendable sensors), and extend target detection ranges by enabling lower frequency transducer designs. Despite the recent performance, size, and property uniformity demonstrations of QorTek TX101 textured ceramics, key obstacles remain to realizing widescale market acceptance These revolve around production capacity, yield, and price as yet not being comparable to standard, but much lower performance, PZT materials. The issues are rooted in non-standard textured piezoceramic specific processing steps (i.e., template, slurry, wet forming, and BBO) that are not part of a PZT production causing yield issues. This program will focus on addressing these yield issues as to enable textured parts approach the baseline cost of standard piezoceramic parts in use by US Navy.
Benefit: This SBIR technology development will result in significant improvement in textured ceramic manufacturing process steps to achieve >90% yield in each process step, and resolve process throughput (capacity) bottleneck issues as well as bring the cost closer to PZT equivalent parts. The piecewise improvements in process throughout the proposed program will be available to be directly adopted in existing manufacturing process. The improved manufacturing process will lower the cost, improve the batch size and process capacity; therefore, it will have direct impact on the volume and quantity of textured ceramic parts that can be delivered. This will expand the applicability of textured piezoceramics in underwater sensor and projector applications as a whole; however, we mainly target the projector applications and next generation A-size buoys (e.g., Q125-TX) in particular. This is due to their high-volume demand (120k parts/year) and already proven impact on transducer performance compared to its PZT equivalent based on our previous results. In addition, another large volume projector application such as TR-343 due its piezo-element size will also greatly benefit from such textured parts cost improvement capabilities.
Keywords: process development, process development, Sonar, PZT, Yield, Affordable, textured ceramic, Piezoelectric, Acoustic Projector
