Characterization of Piezoelectric Shear Mode Inkjet Actuator

ABSTRACT

Impedance analysis was used to characterize the properties of Piezoelectric Shear Mode Inkjet Actuators. Ceramic actuators poled parallel to the channel walls exhibit good performance. Applying high voltage the actuators can be depolarized at high temperature or even re-poled perpendicular to the channel walls. This limits the drive pulse and the bias voltage below the coercive voltage. The leakage current also has been studied with various conditions. For the ferroelectric ceramic materials, the Schottky barrier also can be measured at definite voltage and temperature ranges, the corresponding Barrier for the Al/PZT contact is 0.98 eV. A pronounced low-temperature dielectric relaxation process was observed between 100–150 K; the relaxation rate fellows the Arrhenius law, the fitted activation energy is 0.194 eV. The resonance frequency increases as decreasing the temperature because of increasing for the stiffness coefficient at low temperature.

Keyword:

• Piezoelectric
• inkjet
• impedance
• resonance
• actuator
• polarization

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Dr. Sergey Khartsev for the technical assistance, Dr. Jürgen Brünahl for useful discussion and XaarJet AB (Sweden) for providing us with piezoelectric inkjet actuators. This work was supported by the Göran Gustafssons Foundation.