A Piezoelectric Motor using Flexural Vibration of a Thin Piezoelectric Membrane

This paper describes a new implementation of a disk-type piezoelectric motor, whose stator is a commercial available piezomembrane composed of a nickel alloy disk to which a piezoceramic disk is bonded. The two disks are concentric, and the total thickness is very small. Ultrasonic motors are based on the concept of driving a rotor by mechanical vibration excited on a stator, via the piezoelectric effect. The rotor is in contact with the stator, and the driving force is the frictional force between rotor and stator. To transform the mechanical vibration of the stator in the rotor rotation, a traveling wave must be excited on the stator surface. The proposed motor can be regarded as a disk-type, single wavelength motor in which the traveling wave is due to the natural flexural vibration of the piezomembrane at low frequency. The behavior of the stator is analyzed both theoretically, by using the theory of isotropic and homogeneous vibrating plates, and by means of a commercial finite element computer code, finding a good agreement with the experimental results. The main features of the motor are very small thickness, appreciable torque, and high speed, obtained with low input power at low voltage; the intended application is to substitute the moving-coil in analogic instrumentation.