Piezoelectric ceramic rectangular transducers in flexural vibration

Based on the equivalent elastic method and coupled vibration theory, an analytic method is presented to study the flexural vibration of rectangular transducers consisting of piezoelectric ceramic thin plates. By introducing a mechanical coupling coefficient, the flexural vibration of the piezoelectric ceramic rectangular thin plate is reduced to two simple, one-dimensional flexural vibrations of narrow piezoelectric ceramic strips. The resonance frequency equations for the piezoelectric ceramic rectangular thin-plate transducers in flexural vibration are derived under the free and simply supported boundary conditions analytically. The relationship between the resonance frequency and the flexural vibrational order, the geometrical shape, and the dimensions of the piezoelectric ceramic rectangular thin-plate transducer is analyzed. It is demonstrated that the one-dimensional vibrational theory for the flexural vibration of a narrow piezoelectric ceramic strip and the stripe-mode flexural vibrational theory for the piezoelectric ceramic rectangular thin plate can be derived directly from the theory obtained in this paper. Experimental results show that the measured resonance frequencies of the piezoelectric ceramic rectangular thin-plate transducers in flexural vibration under free-boundary conditions are in good agreement with the calculated results. The method presented in this paper can be used in the resonance frequency analysis of vibrating systems in coupled vibration.