Hysteresis behavior and modeling of piezoceramic actuators

A new theory is developed to model the hysteresis relation between polarization and electric field of piezoceramics. An explicit formulation governing the hysteresis is obtained by using saturation polarization, remnant polarization, and coercive electric field. A new form of elastic Gibbs energy is proposed to address the coupling relations between electrical field and mechanical field. The nonlinear constitutive relations are derived from the elastic Gibbs energy and are applicable in the case of high stroke actuation. The hysteresis relations obtained using the current model are correlated with experimental results. The static deflection of a cantilever beam with surface-bonded piezoelectric actuators is analyzed by implementing the current constitutive relations. Numerical results reveal that hysteresis is an important issue in the application of piezoceramics.