Hysteresis in nanopositioning systems driven by dual-stack differential driving piezoelectric actuators

Abstract The existence of hysteresis phenomenon in piezoelectric actuators of nanopositioners adversely affects their performance, e.g. image distortion in Atomic Force Microscopy. A usual approach to circumnavigate hysteresis nonlinearity is feedforward compensation where the performance depends extensively on the accuracy of the hysteresis model. To achieve accurate modeling of hysteresis in nanopositioners driven by piezoelectric stacks, we used a dual-stack differential driving configuration. Comparing hysteresis in single-stack piezoelectric actuators with dual-stack piezoelectric actuators in differential driving configuration, we observed a more symmetric behavior for the hysteresis in dual-stack differential driving actuators. Then, we modeled the differential driving configuration by utilizing coupled electromechanical equations with hysteresis models applied to them. In particular, Duhem and Prandtl-Ishlinskii (P–I) methods were used for hysteresis modeling. Based on the models and experimental data, we observed that the maximum value of the Duhem modeling error reduced from 9.63% for the nondifferential configuration to 1.85% for the differential configuration. For the P–I method, the maximum modeling error decreased from 7.46% to 2.77%. This observation shows that the dual-actuated differential driving configuration improves hysteresis modeling accuracy. Therefore, this configuration is a suitable choice for the applications where accuracy is of prime importance.