A Boundary Element Model for CMUT-Arrays Loaded by a Viscoelastic Medium.

This work is an extension of a model previously developed by our group to simulate the electroacoustic response of capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT)-based linear arrays acoustically loaded by a fluid medium. The goal is to introduce the viscoelasticity effects of the propagation medium into the modeling. These effects are mainly due to the passivation layer used to protect the transducer, i.e., a silicon polymer, a few hundred micrometers thick. The passivation layer is also required to ensure good acoustic coupling between the transducer front face and human skin. The theoretical approach relies on the determination of a new boundary matrix to simulate the acoustic coupling between the CMUT array and the viscoelastic medium. The complete numerical implementation of a 3-D Green's function for a viscoelastic half-space is hence described. In order to reduce computing time, an optimization was carried out through vectorization and parallelization methods. A comparison is then performed with the analytical solutions, from the literature, obtained for elastic half-space. An experimental validation of shear viscosity effects is performed through electrical impedance measurements of the CMUT linear arrays loaded by oils of varying viscosity. A very good agreement is obtained, showing that the model correctly takes the shear viscosity effects on the mechanical response of the CMUT into account, i.e., a shift in the resonance frequency and a diminution in the mechanical quality factor are observed.