• Proceedings of the Korean Society For Composite Materials Conference
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• 2003.04a
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• pp.87-90
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• 2003

In this paper, the electromechanical displacements of curved actuators such as THUNDER are calculated by finite element method to design the optimal configuration of curved actuators. To predict the pre-stress in the device due to the mismatch in coefficients of thermal expansion, the adhesive as well as metal and PZT ceramic is also numerically modeled by using hexahedral solid elements. Because the modeling of these thin layers causes the numbers of degree of freedom to increase, large-scale structural analyses are performed in a cluster system in this study. The curved shape and pre-stress in the actuator are obtained by the cured curvature analysis. The displacement under the piezoelectric force by an applied voltage is also calculated to compare the performance of curved actuator. The thickness of metal and adhesive, the number of metal layer are chosen as design factors.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society For Composite Materials Conference
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• 2003.10a
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• pp.167-170
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• 2003

In this paper, the electromechanical displacements of curved actuators using laminated composites are calculated by finite element method to design the optimal configuration of curved actuators. To predict the pre-stress in the device due to the mismatch in coefficients of thermal expansion, the carbon-epoxy and glass- epoxy as well as PZT ceramic is also numerically modeled by using hexahedral solid elements. Because the modeling of these thin layers causes the numbers of degree of freedom to increase, large-scale structural analyses are performed in a cluster system in this study. The curved shape and pre-stress in the actuator are obtained by the cured curvature analysis. The displacement under the piezoelectric force by an applied voltage is also calculated to compare the performance of curved actuator. The thickness of composite is chosen as design factor.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society For Composite Materials Conference
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• 2005.04a
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• pp.5-8
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• 2005

In this paper, the electromechanical displacements of curved piezoelectric actuators composed of PZT ceramic and laminated composite materials are calculated based on high performance computing technology and the optimal configuration of composite curved actuator is examined. To accurately predict the local pre-stress in the device due to the mismatch in coefficients of thermal expansion, carbon-epoxy and glass-epoxy as well as PZT ceramic are numerically modeled by using hexahedral solid elements. Because the modeling of these thin layers increases the number of degrees of freedom, large-scale structural analyses are performed through the PEGASUS supercomputer, which is installed in our laboratory. In the first stage, the curved shape of the actuator and the internal stress in each layer are obtained by the cured curvature analysis. Subsequently, the displacement due to the piezoelectric force (which is resulted from applied voltage) is also calculated. The performance of composite curved actuator is investigated by comparing the displacements obtained by the variation of thickness and elastic modulus of laminated composite layers. In order to consider the finite deformation in the first analysis stage and include the pre-stress due to curing process in the second stage, nonlinear finite element analyses are carried out.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers A
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• v.25 no.10
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• pp.1514-1519
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• 2001

This paper is concerned with design, manufacturing and performance test of LIPCA ( Lightweight Piezo- composite Curved Actuator) using a top carbon fiber composite layer with near -zero CTE(coefficient of thermal expansion), a middle PZT ceramic wafer and a bottom glass/epoxy layer with high CTE. The main point of this design is to replace the heavy metal layers of THUNDER by thigh tweight fiber reinforced plastic layers without losing capabilities to generate high force and large displacement. It is possible to save weight up to about 30% if we replace the metallic backing material by the light fiber composite layer. We can also have design flexibility by selecting the fiber direction and the size of prepreg layers. In addition to the lightweight advantage and design flexibility, the proposed device can be manufactured without adhesive layers when we use epoxy resin prepreg system. Glass/epoxy prepregs, a ceramic wafer with electrode surfaces, and a graphite/epoxy prepreg were simply stacked and cured at an elevated temperature (177 $^{circ}C$ after following an autoclave bagging process. It was found that the manufactured composite laminate device had a sufficient curvature after detached from a flat mold. The analysis method of the cure curvature of LIPCA using the classical lamination theory is presented. The predicted curvatures are fairly in agreement with the experimental ones. In order to investigate the merits of LIPCA, a performance test of both LIPCA and THUNDE$^{TM}$ were conducted under the same boundary conditions. From the experimental actuation tests, it was observed that the developed actuator could generate larger actuation displacement than THUNDERT$^{TM}$.