A study on the piezoelectric actuation performance of prestressed piezoelectric unimorph actuators

Abstract

The actuation performances of the prestressed piezoelectric unimorph actuators piezoelectric unimorph with mechanically prestressed substrate and thin layer unimorph driver are evaluated in terms of actuation displacement and force. During the performance tests, these prestressed piezoelectric unimorph actuators showed highly nonlinear behavior, in which their actuation performances were not proportional to the magnitude of the applied voltage, although normally they exhibit higher actuation performances at higher driving voltages. This means that the nominal piezoelectric material properties from the standard method were no longer valid for evaluating and predicting the actuation performances of the piezoelectric unimorph with mechanically prestressed substrate and thin layer unimorph driver actuators under high-voltage application. In this article, the nonlinear piezoelectric material properties, especially the elastic modulus and the piezoelectric strain coefficient, were obtained by considering the prestress, the applied voltage, and the re-poling treatment of the piezoelectric material inside the prestressed piezoelectric unimorph. Finally, actuation performance simulations were conducted using the nonlinear material properties, and the analytical results were compared and validated with the experimental results.

Influence of piezoelectric nonlinearity on active vibration suppression of smart laminated shells using strong field actuation

“…The need to incorporate the nonlinear piezoelectric material behavior into the modeling of smart structures was felt when the experimental measurements of their response showed significant deviations from theoretical predictions based on the linear model at relatively large electric fields. Such deviations have been reported in many studies covering cantilever smart plates (Crawley and Lazarus, 1991), lightweight piezo-composite curved actuators (Lee et al., 2002; Yoon et al., 2004), smart curved shells (Gupta et al., 2004), and prestressed piezoelectric unimorph actuators (Kang, 2014). There are, however, other types of piezoelectric nonlinearity such as the ferroelastic softening, which may be pronounced even at weak electric fields, typically near resonance (Leadenham and Erturk, 2015).…”

Needle selector failure detection based on piezoelectric sensor and driver co-location characteristics

“…14 studied new piezoelectric cantilever electronics for sensing and executive functions that can implement self-test functions. Kang 15 estimated the prestress and actuation performance of a monolithic piezoelectric actuator based on the displacement and force of the drive. Pelletier et al.…”

“…Suresh et al 14 studied new piezoelectric cantilever electronics for sensing and executive functions that can implement self-test functions. Kang 15 estimated the prestress and actuation performance of a monolithic piezoelectric actuator based on the displacement and force of the drive. Pelletier et al 16 proposed a selfinductive piezoelectric actuator with complete digital compensation, and experimentally verified that the corrected SSA current can provide better experimental results.…”