| About this Abstract |
| Meeting |
2025 TMS Annual Meeting & Exhibition
|
| Symposium
|
Additive Manufacturing: Marine Materials and Structures
|
| Presentation Title |
3D Printing of High-Sensitivity Architected Piezoelectric Hydrophones with Designed Beam Patterns |
| Author(s) |
Victor Couedel, Haotian Lu, Rayne Zheng |
| On-Site Speaker (Planned) |
Victor Couedel |
| Abstract Scope |
Piezoelectric hydrophones are crucial for underwater applications such as communication and seafloor mapping. Traditional ceramics manufacturing methods restrict hydrophone shapes to simple geometries, limiting their sensitivity, directivity, and frequency bandwidth. This work introduces a new class of high-performance 3D printed piezoelectric hydrophones with rationally designed micro-architectures. Using a high-resolution light-based printing process and optimized liquid phase sealing sintering, the piezoelectric coefficients and electromagnetic coupling factor reach 92% and 85% of pristine material values. A framework was developed to manipulate the piezoelectric coefficients by modifying the spatial arrangement and thickness of unit cell struts, achieving hydrophones with 15 dB higher sensitivity than commercial ones and with tailorable directivity patterns. This enables Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation without the need of hydrophone arrays and with a hydrostatic figure of merit up to five times superior to commercial hydrophones. Preliminary Machine Learning studies for sub-hydrostatic frequency DoA estimation also show promising results. |
| Proceedings Inclusion? |
Planned: |
| Keywords |
Additive Manufacturing, Computational Materials Science & Engineering, Machine Learning |