Principle, characterization and control of a new hybrid thermo-piezoelectric microactuator

This paper presents a new actuator based on a unimorph piezocantilever and on the thermal bimorph principle, called hybrid thermo-piezoelectric actuator. The main advantage of the proposed actuator is the high range of positioning from the thermal actuation and the high resolution and bandwidth from the piezoelectric one. A characterization and linear modeling are proposed. Finally, we propose an adapted control law to manage the two possible actuation types.