A New Approach to Modeling System Dynamics—In the Case of a Piezoelectric Actuator With a Host System

With increasing sophistication in the structure and behavior of engineered plants, the system dynamics are becoming more complicated than ever before. This paper presents a new approach to model the dynamics of complex plants, and the new approach is rendered through a novel application of the axiomatic design theory (ADT). In particular, the dynamics to be modeled are analogous to the functional requirement of ADT, while the model structure (i.e., model) is analogous to the design parameter of ADT. In this way, the model development becomes to find a mapping from the functional requirement domain to the design parameter domain. The parameters of the model are further determined by decoupling the design matrix of ADT-an important formalism of ADT. To illustrate its effectiveness, the proposed approach is applied to a host system that is driven by a piezoelectric actuator (PEA). In particular, there is a bonding layer between the host system and the PEA, and sensors are embedded within the host system. To compare the proposed approach to other reported approaches, experiments were conducted, which suggested that the proposed approach is promising.