Performance Study on Smart Piezoelectric Transformers

The attractiveness of the smart piezoelectric technology is mainly due to its desirable features of miniaturization and the extreme simplicity of the resulting components compared to widely used wire wound conventional magnetics. As a result, much attention has been focused on the application of PETs in high frequency switching power supplies as well as low profile inverters. In this paper, performance study on Rosen-type, multilayer piezoelectric transformer (PET) as a potential component for power electronic conversion is presented. The equivalent circuit and impedance response of PET is studied using impedance analyzer HP4192. The effects of load resistance on voltage gain, output power and resonance characteristics are studied using simulations and experimentally under sinusoidal excitation conditions. A sinusoidal source using simple laboratory equipments and a power operational amplifier (POA) is fabricated. The details of this sinusoidal source are also given.