Development of a New Piezoelectric Actuator with Slits

Abstract

A piezoelectric actuator was developed for fluid pumps in health monitoring systems. We devised a piezoelectric actuator with some slits, which allows the stretching and contracting deformation in in-plane direction and creates large deflection in out-of-plane direction. The static behaviors under uniform electric field have been analyzed by finite element method. And then, the optimum geometry of slits was searched by response surface methodology for unimorph and bimorph actuators to output the largest deflection under various fixed conditions. The computational results indicated that a bimorph actuator with cross-shaped slit under outside-fixed condition has superior performance for fluid pumps. The proposed slit-inserted actuators have been manufactured as an experiment. As a result, it was verified that the developed actuator can amplify the deflection compared with conventional nonslit actuators.