Design and Optimization of Squeeze Film Effect based Tactile Display System*

The friction between the fingertip and a plate will be decreased with the squeeze film effect caused by ultrasonic vibration, which will lead to the lateral force changes, and can be used to implement tactile display system through providing the illusions of fine texture surfaces. To improve system performance of this friction based tactile rendering, homogenous and high-amplitude of the tactile plate is needed. This paper presents a method for the optimization of the tactile device configuration, which includes the parameters of geometric dimensioning and the layout of the ultrasonic tactile plate and the piezoelectric actuators. First, the relationship between the various parameters and the vibration mode of the plate is studied through the FEM (finite element method) with ANSYS. Then, a function combining average vibration amplitude μ and its standard deviation σ is proposed for evaluating the various configuration of the tactile display system. Finally, contrast experiments are conducted to verify the efficacy of the proposed method with different system configuration. Furthermore, we demonstrated the proposed method on a tactile display system. The simulation data of optimization method is accordant with the practical experiment results. The proposed optimization method can be applied to general tactile display system designing.