Most people would be looking forward to retirement after a successful career of 45 years. But Dr. Harry Marth is not like most people. Instead, he is most likely the world’s foremost expert on advanced piezo nanopositioning technologies. You would never know, meeting him casually, because despite all his achievements over several decades with PI, he has remained humble. And while he was recently able to drop most of his operational work load, he is looking forward to shifting his focus even tighter to the research side of business. Still closer to the beginning of his career, Dr. Mathias Bach heads PI’s Piezo Systems Group and is tasked with finding new application fields, as well as moving piezo devices into the IoT era.

Q: What about the ceramics?

Dr. Bach: We started our own piezo ceramic manufacturing division almost 3 decades ago. That is an important competitive advantage because we can exercise influence on the ceramic material, do the research, and adapt to customer requirements. Actuator-type piezo ceramics continues to be a very small niche market for large industrial ceramics manufacturers and it is a market difficult to serve. Our piezo ceramic actuators and motors are cultivated especially for applications with precision positioning tasks and need to deliver bulletproof reliability and extremely long lifetime.

Q: Is that the reason for digitizing the piezo?

Dr. Bach: Yes, each piezo will soon have its own IP address (laughs) – even in a vacuum. Seriously though: The piezo ceramics reacts to temperature, humidity and air pressure, like any other drive system. We want to record and analyze these environmental influences to further improve our lifetime models or even perform remote maintenance. We basically need a weather station for each piezo so to speak, but it has to be miniscule in size to be integrated, because a decisive advantage is the small installation space our technology requires.

Q: And what about the traditional machining industry – what do you tell their engineers at the upcoming trade fairs?

Dr. Marth: Even traditional machining engineers want work to with more precision and they are intrigued by our technology. We see applications for piezo systems in cutting and grinding.  We also combine classical drive systems or hexapod parallel kinematics machines with piezo motion to provide more options. In the past, some customers were under the impression “PI” was short for “Piezo Instruments” – but that’s not true. We engineer precision. At Physik Instrumente, the customer can chose from air bearings, magnetic direct drives, motor screw drives, hexapods, and, of course, a large variety of piezo motors and positioning systems.