Compensation of Hysteresis on Piezoelectric Actuators Based on Tripartite PI Model

Piezoelectric ceramic actuators have been widely used in nanopositioning applications owing to their fast response, high stiffness, and ability to generate large forces. However, the existence of nonlinearities such as hysteresis can greatly deteriorate the accuracy of the manipulation, even causing instability of the whole system. In this article, we have explained the causes of hysteresis based on the micropolarization theory and proposed a piezoelectric ceramic deformation speed law. For this, we analyzed the piezoelectric ceramic actuator deformation speed law based on the domain wall theory. Based on this analysis, a three-stage Prandtl–Ishlinskii (PI) model (hereafter referred to as tripartite PI model) was designed and implemented. According to the piezoelectric ceramic deformation speed law, this model makes separate local PI models in different parts of piezoelectric ceramics’ hysteresis curve. The weighting values and threshold values of the tripartite PI model were obtained through a quadratic programming optimization algorithm. Compared to the classical PI model, the tripartite PI model can describe the asymmetry of hysteresis curves more accurately. A tripartite PI inverse controller, PI inverse controller, and Preisach inverse controller were used to compensate for the piezoelectric ceramic actuator in the experiment. The experimental results show that the inclusion of the PI inverse controller and the Preisach inverse controller improved the tracking performance of the tripartite PI inverse model by more than 80%.