Design, fabrication and characterization of a monolithic focusing piezoceramic transducer for an anisotropic material.

Piezoceramic transducers shaped as spherical caps are widely used to focus ultrasound waves in isotropic materials. For anisotropic materials, the sound wave surface is not spherical and the transducer surface should be adjusted to reproduce a portion of this wave surface to focus the emitted sound properly. In this article, we show how to design such a transducer and how to fabricate it in lab on a standard machine from a rod of raw piezo ceramic material.