Flexible Piezoelectric Fibers for Acoustic Sensing and Positioning

• Main Authors: Wang, Shun, Zhang, Ting, Li, Kaiwei, Ma, Shaoyang, Chen, Ming, Lu, Ping, Wei, Lei
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Flexible Electronics; Acoustic Sensors
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/86658; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44145
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Emerging development of flexible acoustic devices focuses on constructing large-area acoustic sensing networks with high spatial and temporal resolution, enabling applications in acoustic sensing and positioning, particularly in underwater and medical fields. Here, a piezoelectric fiber-like device is fabricated by a thermal drawing technique to deliver acoustic sensing functionalities at fiber-optic length scales, flexibility, and uniformity. The resulting piezoelectric fiber device operates in a frequency range of 2–8 MHz with signal-to-noise ratio above 20 dB. Additionally, a single piezoelectric fiber can simultaneously demodulate two monochromatic sound signals with a frequency gap from 0.01 to 30 MHz. As a proof of concept, a 2D 3 × 3 fiber array is fabricated to detect and position an underwater acoustic source with a spatial resolution of one centimeter.