A piezoelectric motor for precision positioning applications

This study presents a novel precise piezoelectric motor capable of operating in either an AC drive mode or DC drive mode. In the AC drive mode, the motor acts as an ultrasonic motor which is driven by two orthogonal mechanical vibration modes to generate elliptical motion at the stator to push the slider into motion. In the DC drive mode, stick-slip friction between the stator and slider is used to drive the motor step-by-step. The experimental results show that the AC drive mode can drive the motor at a high moving speed, while the DC drive mode can simply drive the motor with a nanoscale resolution. In our experiments, a prototype motor is fabricated and its actions are measured. The results demonstrate that in the AC drive mode, the piezoelectric motor can achieve a 106 mm/s speed without a mechanical load and a 34 mm/s speed with 340 g of mechanical load when applying two sine waves with a drive of 11.3 V at 38.5 kHz. Meanwhile, in a DC driving mode, the motor is capable of performing precision positioning with a displacement resolution of 6 nm when driving at 100 Hz.