A travelling wave rotary motor driven by three pairs of Langevin transducers

In this work, numerical simulations and experimental measurements carried out on a high-power ultrasonic motor are presented. The proposed motor is composed of an annular shaped stator and two cone-shaped rotors. The rotors are pressed into contact with the edges of the inner surface of the stator by means of a pre-stress system. A traveling rotating wave is generated in the stator by three pairs of Langevin transducers suitably shifted both in space and time. Each transducer is designed to excite radial nonaxisymmetric modes in the ring. The motor has been effectively clamped to the housing by using two flanges passing through the middle plane of 2 transducers. Finite element analysis was employed to evaluate two different configurations of the motor, both using 6 driving transducers, and to analyze the effect of the flange on the design and on the performance of the transducer. Experimental measurements carried out on a manufactured prototype show that the proposed motor exhibits greatly improved performance in terms of output torque and mechanical power compared with similar previous prototypes which use fewer driving transducers and a different clamping system. The motor weighed 0.67 kg, and had a working frequency of 23.6 kHz, maximum rotational speed of 116 rpm, and static torque of 0.94 Nm.