̀Spatial impulse response of a rectangular double curved transducer.

Calculation of the pressure field from transducers with both a convex and a concave surface geometry is a complicated assignment that often is accomplished by subdividing the transducer surface into smaller flat elements of which the spatial impulse response is known. This method is often applied to curved transducers because an analytical solution is unknown. In this work a semi-analytical algorithm for the exact solution to a first order in diffraction effect of the spatial impulse response of rectangular-shaped double curved transducers is presented. The solution and an approximation to it are investigated. The approximation reformulates the solution to an analytically integrable expression, which is computationally efficient to solve. Simulation results are compared to FIELD II simulations. Calculating the response from 200 different points yields a mean error for the different approximations ranging from 0.03% to 0.8% relative to a numerical solution for the spatial impulse response. It is also shown that the presented algorithm gives consistent results with FIELD II for a linear flat, a linear focused, and a convex nonfocused element. The solution involved a three-point Taylor expansion and gave an accuracy of 0.01%.