Contribution to improving the spatial resolution of a pulsed electro acoustic cell measurement: An analysis of acoustics waves propagation

This work aims at improving the spatial resolution for the pulsed electro-acoustic method - PEA. Whatever the measurement principle considered, the best spatial resolution achieved so far is of the order of several micrometers, being at most 10μm in case of the PEA method. This limit constitutes a drawback when considering rather thin insulating layers (order of tens of μms), as the case in some capacitors or in films layed on outer parts of satellites. Also, a better resolution is expected to provide a better description of charge generation in insulations at metal dielectric interfaces or under low energy electron beam. This work is focused on acoustic waves propagation inside the PEA cell and the analysis of influence of piezoelectric transducer geometry's of the quality of output voltage signal.