A Micro Piezoelectric Motor With Multiple Excitation Modes and Methods

To widen the performance of piezoelectric motors, this paper demonstrates a micro piezoelectric motor having multiple driving ways. The stator includes a hollow polygon bar and two groups of PZT plates. PZT plates are symmetrically bonded onto a brass base, and used to actuate the vibration modes of the stator. The symmetrical design enables the motor to operate in two types of vibration modes. The working modes are the second/third-order in-plane bending modes, and can be excited by different ways. Elliptical motion of stator surface points is generated by superposition of two bending modes with the same order. To investigate the feasibility of multi-mode and multi-motivation mechanisms, vibration behaviors of stator driving particles are simulated using ANSYS software. The structural parameters of the stator are strictly designed to harmonize the eigenfrequencies of the vibration modes. The calculated results reveal that the motor performance can be adjusted by selecting different operating modes and excitation ways. The motor performances under various excitation ways and driving modes are also investigated experimentally to validate the proposed design. The dimension of the fabricated prototype motor is 8.3 mm $\times 7.2$ mm $\times 15.0$ mm. The maximum torques are respectively 8.3 cN $\cdot \text{m}$ and 13.3 cN $\cdot \text{m}$ under single-phase and two-phase excitation voltages, when the motor operates in the second-order bending modes. The corresponding no-load speeds are respectively 40 rpm and 47 rpm. The maximum torque and speed under the third-order bending modes are much smaller than that under the second-order bending modes.