In recent years, Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been used in our lives various aspects. Do you realize piezoelectric ceramic components are also used in the production of drones?
What are some examples? Let’s list them here:
- Piezoelectric Buzzer: Every drone need it.
Purpose: Takeoff alert, low battery/loss of control/return warning, obstacle avoidance alerts, and crash search (finding back the drone by sound). - Piezoelectric speaker: Some safety inspection and law enforcement drones use piezoelectric speakers (ultrasonic modulation type) to achieve lightweight, low-power sound generation.
- Ultrasonic Altitude positioning/Obstacle Avoidance Transducer: By installing piezoelectric ceramic transducers, paired ultrasonic signals are transmitted and received. By calculating the time difference between the emitted and received echoes, the distance between the drone and the ground or target can be determined.
- Piezoelectric sensors: Pressure/Acceleration/Impact Sensor: Used for flight test parameter measurement, wing structure health monitoring, engine vibration monitoring, and recording of impact during landing, etc. Most of these piezoelectric ceramic sensors are based on the direct piezoelectric effect. Their applications are very popular.
- Piezoelectric ceramic motors: Used for drone lens focusing (in professional unmanned aerial vehicles with high-precision gimbal-mounted optoelectronic pods).
Piezoelectric ceramic motors are used in agricultural drones: piezo motor driven micropumps precisely control pesticide spraying flow and pump on/off switching; Piezoelectric motors are small in size and have a fast response. - Piezoelectric vibrating gyroscopes (rate gyroscopes): Use piezoelectric ceramic devices to detect angular velocity, then it can control flight attitude for drones, passenger airplane, and cargo aircraft.
- Piezoelectric ceramic elements are also needed in fuel-powered drones: Utilizing the inverse piezoelectric effect, they control the injector needle valve, precisely controlling the needle valve lift.
Fuel-powered engines always vibrate significantly, requiring accelerometer-piezoelectric sensors for vibration monitoring and fault warning. - Airborne ultrasonic non-destructive Testing Probe: A piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer is mounted on a drone for inspecting areas which people can not reach, such as internal concrete damage, wind turbine blade damage, and bridge structures.
- Weather and Rainfall Sensing: Weather drones are equipped with piezoelectric sensors. The core component is a PZT-5 piezoelectric ceramic chip. The impact of raindrops generates electrical pulses that are sent to the sensor, then we can calculate the rainfall intensity.