A Comparison Study Between High-Frequency Kerfless and Fully-Kerfed Ultrasonic Phased Arrays

A recent investigation of kerfless arrays has shown that these arrays produce broader directivity patterns than expected based on previous literature. In this work, a quantitative evaluation of kerfless arrays is presented and the performance is compared to similarly constructed kerfed and sub-diced arrays. To explain the observed results, an updated version of the impulse response model is presented that accounts for the high levels of lateral coupling within kerfless arrays. Though the kerfless arrays investigated in this work had slightly less resolution in comparison to kerfed arrays, the complexity of fabrication was significantly reduced. It is postulated that these observations on kerfless arrays may facilitate single-use imaging applications requiring low-cost manufacturing processes.