Precise positioning solutions really can be low cost: Piezoelectric actuators for various levels of integration

Those who prefer to use OEM products for technical or financial reasons can now keep the investment costs at a relatively low level even for demanding positioning tasks. Physik Instrumente (PI) from Karlsruhe in Germany, now offers a number of lever-amplified actuators in its PiezoMove Series (Figure 1), which cover the level of integration between preloaded stack actuators (displacement up to around 100 µm) and complete, multi-axis stages in PI’s comprehensive product program. The lever-amplified actuators have the piezo actuators mechanically integrated into flexures. This improves the guiding precision; there is no danger of rotation or lateral displacement. At the same time, the flexures translate the displacement of the piezo into larger travel ranges. Lever-amplified actuators are much smaller than nanopositioning systems and are thus easy to integrate. This compact size limits the choice of sensors and the realization of parallel-kinematics multi-axis solutions, however.

The lever-amplified actuators in the PiezoMove series are available in three versions to cover different user requirements: P-601 lever-amplified actuators have travel ranges up to 400 μm, a high positioning accuracy and very compact dimensions. P-602 lever-amplified actuators operate with large travel ranges up to 1 mm. Thanks to their extremely flexible design, multilayer actuators with a footprint of 10 by 10 mm can be used here to increase the stiffness and thus produce greater force generation.

And last but not least, P-603 lever-amplified actuators achieve travel ranges up to 500 µm and are designed for particularly cost-optimized large-scale production.

Over the last four decades, the Karlsruhe-based company has become the leading manufacturer of nanopositioning technology. PI is a private company with healthy growth, more than 500 employees world-wide and a flexible, vertically integrated organization which enables PI to fulfill almost any request in the field of innovative precision positioning technology. All key technologies are developed in-house. This means that every phase from the design right down to the shipment can be controlled: The precision mechanics and the electronics as well as the position sensors and the piezo ceramics or actuators. The latter are produced by the subsidiary company PI Ceramic. PI has its own sales and service offices in all important markets. Moreover, the company maintains testing devices for nanometrology on three continents. PI Shanghai and USA have additional development and manufacturing resources which allow rapid local reaction to custom-engineered specifications.

Physik Instrumente (PI) GmbH & Co. KG
Auf der Roemerstrasse 1
76228 Karlsruhe
Germany
www.pi.ws
info@pi.ws
Phone + 49 721 48 46 - 0

This release was published on openPR.