PICA Piezoelectric Stack Actuators

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 suitable tips and bases with standard dimensions in stock and mounts them prior to delivery. Possible designs are low-profile or spherical end pieces made of metal , ceramics, glass or sapphire. Application-specific end pieces can be manufactured on request.

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.

All piezo actuators can be equipped for UHV environments of up to 10^-10 mbar. In this case, they can be heated up to more than 100 °C and provided with suitable stranded wires. For operation in magnetic fields, the ceramic materials and the metals used are selected to fit the electrical contact.

PI Ceramic integrates piezo ceramics into the customer’s product. This includes both 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.

Aluminum oxide end pieces have a thermal expansion coefficient that is adapted to the actuator. This considerably reduces the thermomechanical load on the actuator.