Electronic quality factor control for piezoelectric transducer arrays

Electronic quality factor control for piezoelectric transducer arrays

Wemelsfelder, Tom (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Lopes Marta da Costa, T.M. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Biomedical Engineering

2024-02-23

In recent years, many therapeutic applications for medical ultrasound have arisen, such as ablation of tumors, breaking up kidney stones, and neuromodulation. To localize the target area, often ultrasound imaging methods are used. Conventionally, a different transducer array is used for imaging and therapeutic applications because of their conflicting requirements of transducer damping. If this damping would be done electronically, it can be switched on or off on demand, allowing a single transducer array to be used for both therapeutic and imaging ultrasound. This would allow medical ultrasound devices to be smaller and therapeutic treatments to have reduced overall system complexity. This thesis develops a PCB to compare a combination of existing and novel methods of electronic damping on a single transducer, also called electronic Q-factor control. A maximum damping of 23\% is achieved relative to the undamped transducer mounted on the PCB. This is achieved by a novel method based on a feedback loop around a second 'dummy' transducer. Methods of electronic Q-factor control should eventually be extended to be applied in an Integrated Circuit for damping of entire ultrasound transducer arrays.

Ultrasound Imaging
ultrasound neurostimulation
Ultrasound Transducer
Piezoelectric
Q-factor
Quality factor
Neuromodulation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:dc75e4b8-356e-4ce5-bbd0-7a672c5ae394

2026-02-23

Student theses

master thesis

© 2024 Tom Wemelsfelder