Transient Effects in Transducer Arrays

The familiar transient behavior of electromechanical transducers vibrating in vacuum is modified by acoustic effects when these transducers vibrate in a medium such as water. These effects are of particular interest in the large transducer arrays used in sonar, where the acoustic interactions between transducers causes different transient behavior at different locations in the array. A finite-difference iteration solution of the differential equations that describe the interacting transducers has been carried out in order to investigate some of these effects. The acoustic interactions are included in an approximate way that becomes more exact as the transducers are made smaller. The velocity of each transducer is computed as a function of time from the instant of sudden application of the driving voltages until steady state is reached. The convergence of the method has been checked by comparison with independent calculations of the steady-state velocities. Results will be given and discussed for different transducer and array parameters including cases of beam steering.