Experimental characterization and modular modeling of hystereses for smart material actuators

In this article, we present a novel modular modeling approach to describe the hystereses for piezoelectric, magnetostrictive and shape memory alloy (SMA) actuators. For the above actuators, the output vs. input loops exhibit varying hystereses under the input signals of the different frequencies and amplitudes. To this end, the experimental characterization is conducted and hysteresis modeling approach is studied. Two characteristic indexes, i.e. loop relative width, loop asymmetry coefficients, are quantitatively analyzed according to the open-loop experiments for the three actuators. Based on the hysteresis phenomenon analyses, different submodels are selected to describe those phenomena. The Prandtl-Ishlinskii submodel is applied for symmetry rate-independent hysteresis identification; the arctangent-polynomial modified Prandtl-Ishlinskii submodel is proposed for asymmetry rate-independent hysteresis identification; infinite impulse response submodel is used for rate-dependent hysteresis identification. Those submodels are selected to construct a cascaded overall model to describe the hysteresis of piezoelectric, magnetostrictive, and SMA actuators. The hysteresis experimental identification results show that, with the proposed phenomenon-based hysteresis modular modeling approach, better performance can be obtained in terms of modeling accuracy and computation time than some other approaches.