A direction-guidance hybrid excitation method for inertial flexible hinge piezoelectric actuator with high speed performance

Piezoelectric actuators play a crucial role in both scientific research and industrial applications. With the increasing demand on the high speed performance piezoelectric actuators, various inertial flexible piezoelectric actuators driven by sawtooth wave based on the stick slip principle have been proposed to satisfy the requirement, but the problem of low speed performance commonly exists. This paper proposes a direction-guidance hybrid (DGH) excitation method which can overcome the limitation. The excitation method is achieved by a direction-guidance hybrid (DGH) wave. Different from the existing excitation methods, not only the DGH wave can make the actuator produce a pre-deformation which can guide the slider to move and adjust the locking force, but also can drive the actuator to move with high speed even at a low voltage. In order to verify the excitation method, a novel inertial flexible hinge piezoelectric actuator is designed and manufactured. Furthermore, the finite element method (FEM) and experiments are conducted to detect the superior high speed performance of the prototype driven by the proposed excitation method. Compared with the existing actuators, the prototype driven by the DGH excitation method, even at less than 1/10 of input voltage, can achieve a 1.5 times higher speed. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.