Nam Seo Goo
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul, 143-701, Korea
K. Joon Yoon
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul, 143-701, Korea

Received 31 July 2002
Revised 15 November 2002

This paper has focused on the analysis of newly proposed Lightweight Piezo-composite Curved Actuator. LIPCA was born from the idea that the heavy metal layers of THUNDER^TM were replaced by lightweight fiber reinforced plastic layers. Several combinations of composites and PZT wafer have been tested and finally two types are chosen: LIPCA-C1 and C2. Finite element code, developed in the previous work, has been used for the investigation of their static and dynamic behaviors. The maximum actuation displacements and fundamental frequency with respect to the design parameters are presented.