Abstract:
The progress of underwater transducers is summarized in this review. Every advent of new functional materials and manufacturing techniques has led to technical innovations and substantial improvements in transducer performance. Some important functional materials such as: magnetostrictive materials and single crystal piezoelectrics are introduced to show their advantage in underwater transducer. On the other hand, lots of new manufacturing techniques have been adopted to improve bandwidth, beam pattern,power output, submersion depth of underwater transducer. Some new concepts and configurations were born and have won acceptance during this period are presented in this paper, such as for low frequency transducers, broadband transducers, particular beam pattern transducers, high power transducers, deep submergence transducers, and so forth. The design ideas of underwater transducer can be applied to other transducers too.