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Integrated Piezo-Element Drive Electronics for Structural Health Monitoring

Y. GUO, B. MURMANN

Abstract


This paper presents the theory and design of an integrated piezo-element drive chip for use in active Structural Health Monitoring (SHM). The integrated circuit (IC) can drive a miniature piezoelectric transducer with a tone-burst signal of ±36 V up to 850 kHz. This combination of high voltage, high frequency and the type of waveform, as dictated by the application, is beyond the capability of existing ICs. We propose a solution using pulse width modulation (PWM), in which the tone-burst signal is rendered by a series of precisely timed pulses. The switching times of the PWM pulses are engineered by formulating and solving a least square optimization problem. The accuracy of the switching times is the most crucial design requirement for an IC implementation of this scheme. A circuit technique is introduced to compensate the uncertainty of the switching times to achieve sub-nanosecond timing accuracy.

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