The Role of Additive Manufacturing Technology in the Design of Sparse Transducer Arrays

Large two-dimensional (2D) arrays offer very promising prospects as an analysis tool due to their capability to obtain information of volumetric spaces. However, this kind of development has major drawbacks. The main challenge comes from the large number of elements required to achieve an acceptable image quality. The sparse arrays have been proposed as a compromise solution between the number of active elements and dynamic range. Although we can find in the literature a lot of examples about sparse arrays models, there is a significant lack of experimental prototypes. The main reason for this is that the manufacturing process is expensive and complex. In order to address this problem, the capabilities to develop structural parts of sparse arrays of manufacturing process based on Additive Manufacturing technology have been analyzed in this paper.