Piezo Flexure Actuators and Guides
While maintaining the high force and the “plug and play” simplicity of piezo actuators, PI have developed optimised flexure lever amplified Piezo actuators. These flexure guides have already proven their worth in precision motion and positioning, in applications like sample handling, microliter dosing and microscopy. The PI Focusing (PIFOC) microscope objective scanners, use flexure guides to produce sub- nanometer resolution, with microsecond settling time but with longer travel ranges than can be achieved with standard piezo actuators.
Flexure actuators guided by a piezo actuator, ensure that there is straight motion without tilting or lateral offset. To create this, a solid material is deformed by a frictionless, stictionless device (the flexure) – complete without rolling or sliding parts. The motion of a flexure joint is based on the elastic deformation of a solid. With the actuator mechanically integrated into the flexure joint, a basic lever structure can lose a considerable amount of guiding accuracy and stiffness, so the design requires complex geometries to ensure there is no loss in performance. PI has continually optimised these mechanical systems as a result of 40 years of experience with micromechanics and nanopositioning.
Maintenance free
The key advantages are the high stiffness, impressive load capacity and because there are no moving parts in the conventional sense, flexures require no lubricants or consumables and are maintenance-free. Furthermore, as they can be manufactured from non-magnetic materials, they can function in a vacuum or other extreme environments, without any problem.
Flexures allow motions with extremely high path accuracy. In order to compensate for height or transversal offset, PI has developed special multi-link flexure guides. These guiding systems allow for a flatness and straightness with precision in the nanometer or micro-radian range.
PI UK is a subsidiary of the global enterprise Physik Instrumente GmbH. The PI UK office, based in Bedfordshire, is dedicated in supporting the UK industrial and research sectors with all precision motion and positioning requirements.
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