Study on Displacement Self-Sensing of Piezoelectric Actuator

This paper aims to make piezoelectric ceramic actuator self-sense its own displacement in the absence of independent sensor. It is derived from the basic piezoelectric equation that the free charge on the wafer of piezoelectric ceramic actuator contains displacement information. So a displacement self-sensing method based on integrate circuit is presented. Voltage driving circuit for the piezoelectric ceramic actuator and integrated circuit for gathering free charge are designed. Based on the proposed compound circuits, the actuator can sense its own displacement while actuation. It is convenient to adjust the circuit and easy to acquire sensitive signal by using this method, and the impedance mismatching problem met in bridge method is overcome. The experimental results show that piezoelectric self-sensing actuator can effectively measure its displacement signal under the conditions of different wave form of driving voltage and different driving voltage frequency.