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A Manually Reconfigurable Reflective Spatial Sound Modulator for Ultrasonic Waves in Air
Author(s) -
PratCamps Jordi,
Christopoulos Giorgos,
Hardwick James,
Subramanian Sriram
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
advanced materials technologies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.184
H-Index - 42
ISSN - 2365-709X
DOI - 10.1002/admt.202000041
Subject(s) - ultrasonic sensor , acoustics , holography , spatial light modulator , acoustic holography , computer science , sound pressure , wavefront , phase (matter) , phased array , transducer , optics , physics , telecommunications , quantum mechanics , antenna (radio)
Precise control of ultrasonic acoustic waves with frequencies f ≳ 20 kHz is useful in a range of applications from ultrasonic scanners to nondestructive testing and consumer haptic devices. A spatial sound modulator (SSM) is the acoustic analogy to the spatial light modulator (SLM) in optics and is highly sought after by acoustics researchers. A spatial sound modulator is constrained by very distinct practical conditions. Namely, it must be a reconfigurable device which modulates sound arbitrarily from a decoupled source. Here a reflective phase modulating device is realized, whose local units can be tuned to imprint a phase signature to an incoming wave. It is manually reconfigurable and consists of 1024 rigidly ended square waveguides with sliding bottom surfaces to provide variable phase delays. Experiments demonstrate the ability of this device to focus ultrasonic waves in air at different points in space, generate accurate pressure landscapes, and perform multiplane holography. Moreover, thanks to the subwavelength nature of the unit cells, this device outperforms state‐of‐the‐art phased‐array transducers of the same size in the quality and energy distribution of generated acoustic holographic images. These results pave the way for the construction of electronically controlled reflective SSMs.