Properties of piezoceramic materials in high electric field actuator applications

In this paper, we compare the performance of 8 PZT ceramics and one PMN-PT material for typical bending actuator applications. This includes the measurement of non-linear transverse charge coefficient at high electric field strength and related quantities such as the Young’s modulus, relative permittivity, coercive field and their temperature dependencies, and the Curie temperature. Most materials show much higher strains than what is expected from the datasheet values. We further study the operating region for fields against the polarization direction in different operating cycles and demonstrate a long-term stable quick re-poling method which increases the operating range of negative-only cycles from 50% of Ec to 75% of the coercive field.