Rapid Manufacturing of fully-printed, miniaturised, kerfless arrays for high resolution ultrasound imaging

Minaturised, cylindrical ultrasound arrays are showing great promise for applications such as intra-vasculature imaging for peripheral arterial disease, and borescope imaging of internal small pipework for defects or corrosion. However, manufacturing small-scale, high-frequency ultrasound arrays is typically challenging, costly, and time-consuming. Due to being constructed from bulky ceramics, these require specialist micromachining techniques and are inherently fragile and non-flexible. This work demonstrates a novel, 32-element, 20MHz, linear array, with a 260 µm pitch, manufactured by additive-manufacturing techniques (including screen printing) on a highly-flexible thin-film piezoelectric substrate. The result is a cost-effective, low-profile, conformable imaging tool capable of being adapted into ultrasound patches, formed to catheters in biomedical applications, or as a permanently installed sensor for NDT applications.