Piezo Transducers: Flexure Actuators, Piezo Stacks, Tubes, Bimorph Benders, Shear Actuators...

These encased piezo actuators are driven by cofired multilayer PICMA® piezo stacks.  PICMA® piezo stacks are extremely reliable and survived 100 billion cycles of life-testing and harsh environments in space and on the Mars Rover with no failures.

Preloading a piezo stack inside a case by means of special springs allows the actuator to handle higher tensile forces. 

Hermetically sealed actuators with inert gas filling can be used in harsh environments.

Custom actuator designs with larger travel ranges, higher forces or faster response, as well as non-magnetic versions are feasible.

Applications: Piezo actuators can provide high forces and virtually unlimited positional resolution down to the sub-nanometer range. They make for ideal “OEM motion engines” in fields such as biotechnology, nano-dispensing, microfluidics, fast switching and valve control, nanopositioning, optical alignment, microscopy, medical-devices, and life-sciences..

Bimorph, unimorph and multimorph bending mode actuators make use of different layers of active and non-active materials. Lateral motion created by the d31 effect is amplified multiple times.  The advantage is relatively large amount of motion (100’s of microns to millimeters) in a very compact, low profile package.  With the extended motion comes a trade off in force and stiffness.

PI manufactures multilayer (low voltage) and discrete bimorph bender actuators in different standard and custom shapes. 

DuraAct® patch transducers are laminated and provide great flexibility with bending radii to 12mm.  They can be used as senor in structural health testing and as actuator at the same time. Another version based on longitudinally oriented multilayer piezo ceramics (DuraAct Power) uses the high-efficiency d33 effect with reduced  operating voltage.  

Traditional PZT tube actuators are often used in scanning microscopy applications, fiber-optics, and nano-dispensing. When a voltage is applied, the tube shrinks radially and axially proportional with the voltage. Due to the low mass they are very fast, but cannot support high loads.  

For high-load applications and when axial motion is required, the P-080 multi-layer tubular stacks are recommended, or the PICA Thru discrete tubular stack family, for extra high loads.

PICA Shear actuators can also be used in lateral scanning applications. They are more robust than scanner tubes and come in single axis to XYZ configurations.