<title>Electron gun control of smart materials</title>

Abstract

Smart material patches are currently an impractical choice in applications requiring fine spatial resolution or control of complex areas. The static nature of electrodes, the conventional choice for control signal application to many smart materials, makes them unsuitable in these instances. To address this issue the use of electron guns as charge sources for smart material control is investigated in this paper. In the electron gun control method the need for separate electrodes and wire leads is eliminated by depositing the control charges directly on the surface of the piezoelectric material. Since piezoelectric materials are dielectrics the charges remain where deposited by the electron gun. The spatial resolution of this control method is as small as the spot size of the electron beam, which in a focused beam can be as small as tens of microns. Large areas can be covered by a single electron gun simply by scanning the beam using deflection plates. Some practical aspects of electron gun control are presented in this paper. A description of an experimental test bed assembled to evaluate electron gun control of PZT-5H is presented, as are results and conceptual models of the system behavior.