Shear horizontal piezoelectric fiber patch transducers (SH-PFP) for guided elastic wave applications

• A new type of piezoelectric fiber patch transducer is proposed.
• The transducer excites SH0 modes in efficiently without need of a seismic mass.
• It is lightweight.
• Complementary modeling and experimental investigation confirmed the basic ideas.

A new type of a lightweight piezoelectric transducer is proposed for selective excitation of horizontal polarized shear (SH) waves. Based on piezoelectric fibers the transducers are flexible, i.e. show structure conformity. The novel approach allows to introduce significant surface tractions by a transducer with double layer crossed fiber arrangement without the need of heavy seismic masses. The transducer operating principles are explained and the performance of a first transducer version is demonstrated by laser vibrometric measuring of the waves emitted into a plate. Numerical modeling of the identical arrangement shows nearly perfect agreement with measurements for the main features while differences in some details helps to understand how the first transducer version can be improved. The transducer exhibits, depending on its aspect ratio, a rather high directivity and a strong mode selectivity.