Enhancing the Performance of Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers Using C Slots

This article aims to improve the performance of piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs) in the transmission and reception phase including sensitivity, quality factor, and electromechanical coupling coefficient using a slot-based design. The slots help to increase the vibration amplitude and reduce the stiffness and create a membrane with piston-like movements. Also, the thermoelastic loss as one of the fundamental loss parameters in PMUT is reduced and conditions for increasing the quality factor are provided. The proposed structure is simulated in Comsol Multiphysics. The results expose that the quality factor of the new structure is equal to 13 069, which is increased by 122.5% compared to the simple clamped PMUT. Also, at the resonance frequency of 98.02 kHz, displacement and voltage sensitivity are equal to 929.22 nm/V and -106.88 dB, improved by 7.6 and 12.49 times. The designed transducer is used in many applications such as sonar, hydrophones, and fish finders as underwater communication receivers.