Introduction to piezoelectric actuators: research misconceptions and rectifications

The field of piezoelectric actuators is really an interdisciplinary area, to which applied physicists and materials, electrical and mechanical engineers primarily converge. Because of the narrow knowledge of junior researchers, they occasionally publish misleading information, some sort of misconceptions, reflected in the delay of innovative developments of the next generation. This paper reviews the top 10 of these misconceptions, which are primarily related to the understanding of ionic displacement and strain, efficiency, the energy transmission coefficient, the constraint dependency of piezo-material properties, mechanical impedance matching, the piezoelectric damping mechanism, resonance and antiresonance, best-selling devices, and system design principles.