Identification of material nonlinearities in piezoelectric ceramics

Large signal excitation of piezoelectric ceramics, as occurring in many actuator applications, leads to a nonlinear dependence of the piezoelectric material parameters on the electric field and/or the mechanical strain. In order to precisely determine these nonlinear parameter curves, we propose a new inversion algorithm, that is based on numerical simulation of the nonlinear piezoelectric PDEs and that automatically fits the searched for parameters to voltage-current measurements. We will present the theory and numerical case studies of the inverse scheme as well as measurements for the electric field dependency of Pz27 material.