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Question about horn design
12 February, 2005 - 23:55 — spudbone
Hello Chris and thanks for providing a place for fellow Ultrasonics enthusiasts to share information.
I am relatively new to Ultrasonics, although I have over 30 years of professional experience in audio production and audio acoustics. I have worked with what I thought was some seriously amplified systems, but they really don't compare to the power demands of transducers.
So I have two questions:
1) I recently obtained a Langevin bolt-type transducer and want to design and create a suitable clamp-on type Horn (or Sonotrode) for its 28khz frequency. I am using your calculator to determine the ideal parameters, however I am unclear whether the horn should be [u]hollow[/u] or a [u]solid piece[/u]. My experience with driver-loaded audio horns (ie. Public Address systems) have been open type horn designs, which are designed to throw the acoustic signal a certain distance in space.
My application is to experiment with Ultrasonic water disassociation (cavitation) during electrolyis. The clamp-on type horn would allow a convenient method of coupling to an existing electrolysis system (clamped tube diameter would be 1" in diameter) .
2) My experience with electronics makes be want to build my own power system as it needs to be portable, cost-effective and driven from a 12 volt supply. Any suggestions on what would be required to drive this 70 watt transducer? Any source for such information?
I love to study so any recommendation on books is very welcome!
Regards,
Tom
Forums:
Re: Question about horn design
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your contribution to the forum (good to see some new blood here!) and sorry for the delayed response - I'm up to my neck in a server upgrade right now.
I can't help feeling that a 12V 70W transducer is not what you need for experimenting with cavitation - particularly with a clamp-on system since this inevitably gives some power losses. At 28kHz you should be able to find a transducer to give you at least 500-1000W; whether you could set up a 12V PSU for that I don't know...
If your application demands low power 12V operation (eg. for use in the field) then I'd suggest using a probe system instead of clamp-on - this would give you much more efficient transmission and higher power density.
In any case my little sonotrode calculator really isn't suitable for clamp-on systems - they're much too complicated for the simple assumptions built into that. If you haven't seen it already I'd suggest you study Miodrag Prokic's site eg. [url]http://www.mpi-ultrasonics.com/clamp-on-sonics.html[/url] as he's the pioneer of clamp-on systems (maybe this will tempt him to comment here!)
Re: books, again apologies for the lack of updates to the [url=http://www.powerultrasonics.com/books0.html]
books page[/url] here (so many jobs, so little time!). If you want to get into transducer design you could try the downloads on Miodrag's site (warning: VERY technical!). For sonotrode design there really isn't much available, probably the best bet is to do some experimentation for yourself either using FEA if you have access to it or just make and test - with your background you could probably rig something up to test the resonant frequency, and then tuning is a matter of machining the part down gradually until you get it's resonance right... (yes, that is oversimplifying!)
Anyway good luck with it and feel free to come back with some more specific questions or (even better) results.
Chris