Underwater Transducer Capability

Tender description

Request for Information only. The Authority is collecting information about organisations in the UK with expertise in acoustic transducers. Organisations consists of academia, start-ups, small-to-medium enterprises, and large corporations. INTRODUCTION The Authority is evaluating the current capability within the UK to design and manufacture underwater (UW) transducers for use in military application. All parts of the design lifecycle are of interest. Examples of parts of the design process include piezoelectric materials research, modelling of transducer properties through equivalent circuits or finite element methods (FEM), measuring properties of both the device and the active material, prototyping devices, iterative design, and testing & validation. For manufacturing, the Authority is interested in the ability of organisations to manufacture parts of, or whole transducers (the active elements, housing, assembly of parts) at any capacity from a few prototypes up to large scale manufacture on the order of multiple thousands of units per year. Any skills in formulating large quantities of piezoelectric materials are included in the list of topics of interest. Additionally, the Authority is desires to hear about the research, design and manufacture of acoustic transducers which do not use piezoelectric materials as the transducer element. Any research into acoustic transduction is of relevance to this information request.