A friction-inertial-based rotary motor: Design, modelling and experiments

A friction-inertial-based rotary motor driven by shear piezoelectric actuators (SPAs) is proposed in this paper, which possesses many superior features, including high resolution, compact size, large load-capacity, and low cost. In order to eliminate the step loss and increase the step size when an external load is applied, the power-function-shape driving signal was used to actuate the rotary motor. According to the step characteristics under this driving signal, two motion modes were observed and defined, namely the stick-shoot motion mode and the stick-slip-shoot motion mode. The former motion mode can realize a large step size while the later one cannot due to the slipping during the rising phase. After analyzing the results from the numerical simulation and the experiment study, it was found that the motion performance of the motor is closely related to the preload and the base number of the driving signal rather than the size of SPAs, which means the motor can be further downsized according to its actual requirements.