Enhanced Performance of Piezoelectric Bending Actuator by Material Redistribution

This paper presents a design of a piezoelectric bending actuator to achieve enhanced performance by redistributing its piezoelectric material. The performance of the present design has been evaluated by using commercial finite element package. The result reveals that the tip deflection, block force, output energy, output energy density and energy efficiency can be improved by around 20%, 110%, 147%, 147% and 147%, respectively, compared to its existing topologically equivalent counterparts of equal amount of mass and capacitance. However, the frequency of the first mode of vibration that often defines the mechanical bandwidth of the actuator, will be reduced by around 41% compared to its existing topologically equivalent counterparts. Nevertheless, there are many applications, where a piezoelectric cantilever actuator is either vibrated at low resonant frequency, or operated under low bandwidth with enhanced performance. Therefore, the proposed design of piezoelectric bending actuator exhibits prospective usefulness for many applications. Since this research is a comparative study of different structural designs of piezoelectric actuators, therefore, a comparative analysis using finite element models will be sufficient to rationalize the benefits of the proposed design.