Optimal design of a squeeze film actuator for friction feedback

Sense of touch belongs to one of the five Human Senses. Whereas blind people largely use feeling in everyday life, sighted person mainly focus on hearing and vision. However, haptic interface started being introduced in customers applications, such as smartphone, to propose new opportunities to users. A surface put in vibration nearby another can modify the friction coefficient measured between the two objects. This is known as the squeeze film effect. The aim of this paper is to present the optimization of a piezoelectric actuator for friction feedback. Since the computation of the Squeeze film Finite Element (FE) model is time-consuming, it is also proposed to focus only on the mechanical simulations. Indeed, a correlation between the force of the actuator and the volume swept by the travel of the vibrating surface is brought out. Finally, a couple of optimization results are presented for different topologies of actuators. © 2013 IEEE.