An I-shape linear piezoelectric actuator using resonant type longitudinal vibration transducers

Abstract

Resonant type longitudinal vibration transducers are used in this work to construct a linear piezoelectric actuator with four driving feet. Totally three longitudinal transducers are integrated in I-shape to form the proposed actuator, which contains one vertical transducer and two horizontal transducers. These three transducers vibrate under longitudinal modes with certain temporal sequence, whose vibrations are superimposed in the actuator to generate elliptical motions on the four driving feet. The three transducers are tuned to be suitable dimensions, under which they have very close 1st longitudinal resonance frequencies; the working frequency of the piezoelectric actuator is designed to be about 31.3kHz. The vibration coupling problem between the longitudinal transducers are studied by calculating the motion trajectories of the four feet. It is found that the temporal shift of the longitudinal vibrations can be used to tune the movement trajectories; the four feet can get nearly the same vertical displacements under a phase shift of 105°. At last, the vibration characteristics and mechanical output performances of a prototype are measured. The working frequency of the prototype, the maximum speed, and the maximum thrust force are measured to be 33.15kHz, 1563mm/s, and 158.2N, respectively.