Periodic Tubular Structures and Phononic Crystals towards High-Q Liquid Ultrasonic Inline Sensors for Pipes

The article focuses on a high-resolution ultrasound sensor for real-time monitoring of liquid analytes in cylindrical pipes, tubes, or capillaries. The development of such a sensor faces the challenges of acoustic energy losses, including dissipation at liquid/solid interface and acoustic wave radiation along the pipe. Furthermore, we consider acoustic resonant mode coupling and mode conversion. We show how the concept of phononic crystals can be applied to solve these problems and achieve the maximum theoretically possible Q-factor for resonant ultrasonic sensors. We propose an approach for excitation and measurement of an isolated radial resonant mode with minimal internal losses. The acoustic energy is effectively localized in a narrow probing area due to the introduction of periodically arranged sectioned rings around the tube. We present a sensor design concept, which optimizes the coupling between the tubular resonator and external piezoelectric transducers. We introduce a 2D-phononic crystal in the probing region for this purpose. The Q-factor of the proposed structures show the high prospects for phononic crystal pipe sensors.