PICMA® Piezo Linear Actuators

PI Ceramic integrates piezo ceramics into the customer’s product. This includes the electrical contacting of the elements according to customer requirements and the mounting of components provided by the customer, as well as the gluing or the casting of the piezo ceramics. PICMA® multilayer actuators may be integrated, for example, in the customers' own guiding mechanisms and mechanical levers.

Standard contacts for piezo actuators are 100 mm stranded wires or soldering points. For each piezo element, different wires acc. to the AWG standard are used. Please observe the soldering instructions for each product.

PI Ceramic has ball tips and bases for standard piezo actuators in stock and mounts them prior to delivery. Application-specific end pieces can be manufactured on request.

For high-dynamics applications, the multilayer actuators are equipped with electrodes for especially high currents of up to 20 A. Together with a high-power piezo amplifier such as the >> E-618 high operating frequencies in the kHz range can be attained. The rise times for the nominal displacement are a few tens of microseconds.

PICMA® Chip miniature multilayer actuators can be provided additionally with insulated end surfaces. Additional precision-grinding guarantees superior parallelism with minimum tolerances. PICMA® Stack actuators are always delivered with precision-ground surfaces.

PICMA® multilayer piezo actuators with inner hole are also provided with an all-ceramic insulation on the inside so that their lifetime is considerably longer than that of comparable polymer-insulated actuators. PICMA® piezo stack actuators with additional inner hole are ideally suited, for example, for fiber stretching applications.

For especially high-dynamics applications or high ambient temperatures, there are PICMA® multilayer actuator versions that can reliably function at temperatures of up to 200 °C.

Development and production of piezoceramic components are complex processes: Long-term experience and the right machine tools are required to guarantee a prompt and reliable development of specific solutions.

Piezo actuators can be equipped with position sensors to measure the displacement and are then suitable for repeatable positioning with nanometer precision. PI Ceramic uses strain gauge sensors (SGS) consisting of a thin metal foil that is applied to the piezo ceramics.