Driving airborne ultrasound plate transducers at high intensity levels is an important point in many industrial applications, that meets with unavoidable limits due to nonlinear modal interactions. Subharmonic and fractional-harmonic frequency pairs generation, internal modulation and chaotic behaviour are all effects that greatly compromise the transducers efficiency and their use. In the present paper, similarities are put in evidence between a complex plate transducer used for ultrasound generation in air and a simple piezoelectric structure. The latter case, however, could be experimented through a very wide input power range, such that a drop over of the above mentioned effects is set in evidence above a given power level. This suggests that a similar behaviour could be met in the former case, that would greatly advantage the use of such kind of transducers.

Ponencia presentada en el XIX Congreso Internacional de Acústica (ICA2007), Madrid, 2-7 Sep 2007.-- PACS: 43.55.Cs.

This work has been carried out in the frame of the Spanish-Italian Integrated Action HI2004-347.

Peer reviewed