Charge drive with active DC stabilization for linearization of piezoelectric hysteresis

Charge drive circuits can significantly reduce piezoelectric nonlinearity; however, they are rarely used in practice because of their limited low-frequency performance, their dependence of voltage gain on the load capacitance, and their requirement for time-consuming tuning procedures. In this report, a new charge drive circuit is proposed that uses a controlled current source with voltage feedback to stabilize the low-frequency behavior. This approach eliminates many of the present difficulties and allows extremely low transition frequencies without a long transient response. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed charge amplifier can effectively reduce piezoelectric hysteresis and creep to less than 1.3% at scan-rates of 10, 1, and 0.1 Hz.