Thin-disk piezoceramic ultrasonic motor. Part I: design and performance evaluation

The purpose of this study is to gain the knowledge and experience in the design of thin-disk piezoceramic-driving ultrasonic actuator dedicated. In this paper, the design and construction of an innovative ultrasonic actuator is developed as a stator, which is a composite structure consisting of piezoceramic (PZT) membrane bonded on a metal sheet. Such a concentric PZT structure possesses the electrical and mechanical coupling characteristics in flexural wave. The driving ability of the actuator comes from the mechanical vibration of extension and shrinkage of a metal sheet due to the converse piezoelectric effect, corresponding to the frequency of a single-phase AC power. By applying the constraints on the specific geometry positions on the metal sheet, the various behaviors of flexural waves have been at the different directions. The rotor is impelled by the actuator with rotational speeds of 600 rpm in maximum using a friction-contact mechanism. Very high actuating and braking abilities are obtained. This simple and inexpensive structure of actuator demonstrates that the mechanical design of actuator and rotor could be done separately and flexibly according to the requirements for various applications. And, its running accuracy and positioning precision are described in Part II. A closed loop servo positioning control i.e. sliding mode control (SMC) is used to compensate automatically for nonlinearly mechanical behaviors such as dry friction, ultrasonic vibrating, slip-stick phenomena. Additionally, SMC scheme has been successfully applied to position tracking to prove the excellent robust performance in noise rejection. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.