Design of a power amplifer with energy recovery strategy for piezoelectric actuators

This paper presents an analog voltage power amplifier with energy recovery strategy to drive piezoelectric actuators which are for a new piezoelectric servo pump. The whole power amplifier is consisted of the direct current power supply, linear amplifier circuit, and energy recovery circuit, utilizing voltage negative feedback concept to magnify low input voltage into high output voltage. And, the use of the energy recovery circuit makes the whole power amplifier possess higher efficiency and less power supply energy. The simulation results of the whole power amplifier indicates that the power amplifier designed could excellently accomplish the magnification to the input signal, linearly and steadily with relatively high accuracy. In addition, based on the theory calculation and simulation to energy recovery circuit, it can be concluded that the power amplifier with energy recovery circuit could reduce the power-loss by about 50%, and simultaneously could need only an half of power supply energy to drive the actuator, compared with the power amplifier without energy recovery circuit.