Numerical and experimental studies of a flat acoustic source that is actuated by an integrated flexure-based piezoelectric mechanism

This paper focuses on extensive numerical and experimental investigations of a thin sandwich acoustic source. Due to an energy inefficient actuation design, a thin sandwich acoustic source that was proposed in an early study is redesigned and reconstructed in the current research. The thin acoustic source in the present paper is actuated by long piezoelectric stack actuators that are integrated with an auxiliary flexural mechanism. With the aid of the proposed actuation mechanism, the acoustic source is sufficiently thin and can be employed in applications with limited build space. Simplified equivalent parameters are used in a fully-coupled Finite Element (FE) model of the complete thin acoustic source to numerically model the involved physics. An experimental investigation validates the fully-coupled FE model. The obtained results show that there is good agreement between the numerical and experimental studies with an overall error of less than 23%. In particular, the investigation shows that there is very good agreement between the numerical model and the measurement results in the low frequency range up to the fundamental resonance of the thin acoustic source.