Abstract
Piezo devices have large power density and simple structure compared with conventional electrical motors. Thus they can generate larger forces than the conventional actuators with small size. Their resopnses to commands are also very fast and thus the bandwidths are very wide. Thus the piezo devices are expected to be used widely in the future for actuating devices requiring fast response and large actuating force with small size. However, the piezo actuators need high voltage with high driving current due to their large capacitive property. In this paper, proposed is a simple method to drive piezo devices using voltage inversion circuit with coli inductance. The coil inductance carries the charges in the piezo device to the opposite side, inverting the polarity of the applied voltage, thus saving the power to drive the device with AC voltages. Experiments with real circuit demonstrates that the proposed scheme can improve the energy efficiency very much.
