Modeling and Compensation of Charge Leakage in Self-Sensing Position Estimation for Piezoelectric Actuators

Today, piezoelectric actuators are widely used in micro-positioning applications due to unique features such as high precision, fast response and high natural frequency. Despite the aforementioned characteristics, nonlinear characteristics such as hysteresis deteriorate the precision of piezoelectric actuators. In order to reduce the effect of hysteresis in control applications, external sensors are used for feedback control schemes. But, high costs and space limitations are prohibitive factors which limit the application of external sensors. Hence, an alternative is using self-sensing methods that is based on electromechanical characteristics of piezoelectric materials which eventually eliminate external sensors. In this research, self-sensing method is applied for position estimation in piezoelectric actuators. The most conventional method is based on the linear relation of electrical charge and actuator position which the position can be estimated by measuring the actuator charge. But this method is faced with serious challenges due to charge drift, especially at low frequencies. For this purpose, a method for modeling and compensating of charge drift is proposed. Then, by linearization of the electric charge-position relation, the self-sensing method is implemented based on the compensated electric charge measurement. Experiments have confirmed that this method can effectively estimate the actuator position with 1.5% estimation error in the presence of charge leakage.