Pyroelectric PVDF sensor modeling of the temporal voltage response to arbitrarily modulated radiation

Our design of transducer arrays for custom pyroelectric sensors is mainly d evoted to LR laser beam characterization and control. It benefits from some of the properties of PVDF film such as low cost, low weight, mechanical fl exibility, chemical stability (inert), and compatibility of thick film inte rconnection technologies on metallized films. By using the temporal charact eristics of the source intensity and starting from a standard equivalent on e-dimensional model of a multilayer thick-film transducer in the frequency domain, we developed a computer model of the PVDF sensor that determines th e temporal response to arbitrarily modulated radiation. The validation of t he model accuracy has been carried out with a simulation procedure performe d on a PVDF sensor designed for accurate beam alignment of low power laser beams. In this case, an iterative algorithm also was developed to estimate some thermal and physical properties of the front absorbing and the metalli zation layers that are generally barely known. We present a fitting procedu re to determine these properties by using the temporal pyroelectric respons e to a square wave modulated laser diode that provides a reliable reference signal.