Signal conditioning of a novel ultrasonic transducer with integrated temperature and amplitude sensors

Vibration amplitude of ultrasonic transducer has an impact on the overall process quality, process speed and ultrasonic transducer lifetime in industrial applications. A new ultrasonic transducer design has been developed with integrated sensor disks that have different electrical and mechanical properties. The combination of sensor has been designed for amplitude measurements and is also able to measure the transducer temperature in the real time. This paper deals with the analog signal processing that combines the different "raw" signals from the sensor disks to extract the information such as amplitude and temperature. For this goal, a chain of different signal filters and adjustment elements was used. Reliable amplitude and temperature measurements during real-time operation were obtained by the applied signal processing. The obtained results were validated with an external temperature sensor and a laser vibrometer.