Design and development of a linear piezoelectric drive

The focus of this project is to design and develop a linear piezoelectric drive – a linear actuator utilizing two piezoelectric actuators as its source of actuation. Piezoelectric actuators are chosen as the highlight of this project because of its capability to generate a very small displacement, resulting in a high-resolution drive. The drive design is aimed to achieve the capability to work in resonant mode as well as stepping mode. The first was achieved by designing the whole drive’s structure in a way that upon excitation in the intended frequency region, the structure’s resonance would cause it to vibrate and move the drive’s contact point in an elliptical trajectory. The later was achieved by positioning the piezoelectric actuators in a certain arrangement with respect to each other and controlling the excitation phases of each actuator. On top of the drive design and fabrication, investigation on the effect of driving frequency on the modelling of the actuators’ hysteresis behaviour using Classical Prandtl-Ishlinskii model, as well as experiments on the developed prototype’s physical and modal properties as a comparison to the simulation results were carried out. It was observed that the Classical Prandtl-Ishlinskii model is successful in accurately modelling the hysteresis behaviour of the actuator for low driving frequency, but is significantly inaccurate for high driving frequency. The experimental results of the prototype’s physical and modal properties verified the credibility of the simulation results.Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering