Design of fixed frequency controlled radial-mode stacked disk-type piezoelectric transformers for DC/DC converter applications

In this paper, we propose a new design procedure to determine the optimal size of a piezoelectric transformer (PT) for DC/DC converter applications. We examined several parameters, which allows us to produce a piezoelectric transformer with optimal efficiency and which has an optimal range for regulating voltage. The characteristics of a piezoelectric transformer (PT) are well known when the load impedance is a pure resistor. However, when piezoelectric transformers are used in AC/DC or DC/DC converter applications, it requires the presence of a rectifier circuit block. A rectifier is usually a nonlinear device which does not act like a pure resistor. We began by modeling a full-wave rectifier directly in order to understand the design constraint variables such as the maximum mechanical current, the piezoelectric transformer configuration, and the energy balance of the PT configuration. In our final design, a stacked disk-type piezoelectric transformer with radial-mode vibration was chosen due to the large number of design parameters required. In our new design procedure, instead of just looking at the typical optimal loading condition of the PT, we used the concept of a maximum mechanical current to determine the new optimal efficiency which is suitable for voltage regulation. From our results we found that the size of the piezoelectric transformer and efficiency are trade-offs which means that they have an inverse relationship. In summary, we developed a new design procedure to determine the optimal size of a piezoelectric transformer, which we found to be small but with high efficiency so as to provide an optimal range for regulating voltage.