Aufbau eines Messplatzes zur elektromechanischen Prüfung von Piezo-Aktoren

In the last few years ceramic multilayer actuators are being used to control fuel injection in the automotive industry. The key material of this high performance application is lead zirconate titanate, which shows due to its ferroelectrical and ferroelastical properties a non-linear, piezoelectric behaviour (e.g. hysteresis). Effective properties of these devices depend on temperature, mechanical and electrical loading and therefore they have to be determined at all relevant operating points. At the Institut für Struktur- und Funktionskeramik/Montanuniversität Leoben an electromechanical test site was set up by the combination of a universal testing machine with a Sawyer-Tower-circuit. In this thesis a voltage regulation is developed in order to enable experiments assuring a certain electrical loading of the device. The set up is driven by a newly written program using the programming language LabVIEW provided by NATIONAL INSTRUMENTS. In the course of this project the test site is upgraded via an increased equivalent capacity situated in the Sawyer-Tower-circuit. The verification of this new developed measurement method was carried out on several commercial devices.