A novel compact bolted-type piezoelectric actuator excited by two excitation methods: design, simulation, and experimental investigation

Abstract

A novel bolted-type piezoelectric actuator excited by two excitation methods was proposed and investigated in this paper using both simulations and experiments. Different from most existing piezoelectric actuators, the proposed actuator can be excited by two different excitation methods, namely single-phase excitation method and dual-phase excitation method. The structure of the actuator was depicted and its geometric dimensions were presented. Furthermore, the working principles of the proposed actuator under these methods were illustrated in detail, and the vibration characteristics of the driving foot were analyzed using the finite element method. In addition, a prototype was fabricated and an experimental system was set up to evaluate the output performance of the prototype. The experimental results indicated that the actuator achieved a maximum velocity of 483.7 mm s-1 and a maximum thrust of 3.4 kg with dual-phase excitation, and a maximum velocity of 284.6 mm s-1 and a maximum thrust of 2.2 kg with single-phase excitation.