Design, fabrication, and customized driving of dielectric loudspeaker arrays

The suitability for loudspeakers was already demonstrated at the beginning of the development of dielectric elastomer transducers. In contrast to the commonly used electrodynamic principle, which comes along with a variety of components like coils, magnets, springs and a complex system design, dielectric speaker can merely consist of a single membrane. Due to their inherent compliance, only electrodes are necessary to build a loudspeaker. Nevertheless, because of their non-linear actuation behaviour and high driving voltages they were no longer considered in research or commercial applications. Through further development of dielectric films, driving electronics for high voltages and specialized non-linear filters for equalization, these issues can now be addressed. Therefore, we propose new designs of flat dielectric speakers with modular size and adaptable shapes. Total sound pressure levels up to 120 db at 1 m distance, 12.4 kHz transmission range and total harmonic distortions lower than 2 % could be achieved by digital signal processing.