A pipe organ-inspired ultrasonic transducer

This article considers a number of backplate designs for the bandwidth improvement of electrostatic ultrasonic transducers in both transmission and reception modes. Motivated by the design of pipe organs, transducers with backplates which incorporate a number of acoustically resonating conduits are modelled using a transmission line mathematical model which describes the displacement of the electrostatic membrane. The model illustrates that by increasing the number and varying the length of these conduits, the transmission voltage response and the reception force response can be improved over the traditional design by around 50 and 35%, respectively.