Evaluation of driving performance of piezoelectric actuator with current pulse

The authors have proposed a driving method of a piezoelectric actuator by a series of current pulses for the high resolution and the hysteresis reduction. It was compared with the voltage pulse and current linear drives by simulations with Martin´s piezoelectric model. In the case of driving at a high pulse rate, no difference was observed among them. The low output impedance of the voltage source causes the ripple of the terminal voltage of the piezoelectric actuator so that the vibration of the actuator sometimes remains. In contrast, no ripple due to the low pulse density was observed in the current pulse drive. Therefore, the current pulse drive is good for the precision positioning.