The effects of active area geometry on laminated piezoelectric actuator performance
Open Access
- Author:
- Giordano, Joseph Anthony
- Area of Honors:
- Engineering Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Joseph Paul Cusumano, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Gary L Gray, Thesis Honors Advisor
Judith A Todd Copley, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- laminated
piezoelectric
beam
actuator
haptics - Abstract:
- Developers in the blossoming consumer electronics industry are increasingly using haptics, the communication of information through touch, to enhance their product’s appeal. This thesis presents the mathematical model and numerical simulations for a vibrational haptic device, a clamped-clamped laminated piezoelectric beam. The goal of this analysis was to evince design insights for the system, allowing engineers to construct a more effective haptic actuator. The equation of motion and vibrational response of the system were derived using piezoelectric constitutive equations, Hamilton’s Principal, the Assumed Modes Method, and Galerkin’s Method. The haptic performance of the modeled actuator was evaluated based on the total net reaction force and moment amplitudes produced across a range of driving frequencies. Two cases were chosen for simulation. The first case represented the current actuator design method, a rectangular patch of active piezoelectric material laminated on top of the beam. The second case sought to optimize specific modal responses by tailoring the active piezoelectric area across the length of the beam, creating a modal actuator. Numerical simulations of these two cases show that the modal actuators produce much stronger reaction forces and moments compared to the patch actuators. In fact, using a modal actuator instead of the current patch actuators increased the modal forcing by 17.69 for the first mode. The results of this study clearly show the superiority of modal actuators for haptic design. In addition, the study also shows the power of using mathematical models to uncover important design insights that would not be evident otherwise.