Study on the tip-deflection of a piezoelectric bimorph cantilever in the static state

Bimorph-type bending actuators have been widely used in many applications as converters of electric input to mechanical motion, or vice versa. In this paper a new piezoelectric model of a multilayer piezoelectric cantilever is obtained, and the analytic expressions for the curvature, displacement and tip-deflection of the multilayer structure are derived in the static state. With the use of this model and the solution, the tip-deflections of the piezoelectric bimorph cantilever in different working situations are compared and the effect of the metal electrodes on the tip-deflection of the cantilever is considered. The above-mentioned methods and conclusions can be used for optimized design of PZT cantilever structure.