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Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Hi all. Recently salvaged a working pair of 2 output piezo inverters from broken sony laptops.
got one working by connecting the relevant lines to +19V via resistors, haven't tried the other one yet.
Can anyone think of a good application for these other than driving ccfls which IMHO seems a bit of a waste of this cool technology ?
i did determine that driving these can be quite simple if I base my circuit on the one in the inverter, build a suitable two transistor Royer inverter wound with wire to run at the piezo's resonant frequency, and an output winding matched to the primary element. it almost looks like a DRSSTC but using a piezo element instead of a secondary..
Hovering plasma globe anyone?
had a thought to use one to drive small nitrogen lasers, as the output is certainly high enough and the usual breakdown modes do not apply.
Registered Member #2261
Joined: Mon Aug 03 2009, 01:19AM
Location: London, UK
Posts: 581
I thought the Piezo transformer was a great idea after I read about it in a National Semiconductor applications sheet.
They were using it for extreme electrical isolation, but I wondered about trying to make a high voltage version from a one of those mechanical Piezo gas lighters.
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4062
Yes that could work, the problem is that you'd need to use galfenol or something to "pulse" the crystal. I have one here so it might be possible to kludge up something using a piece of acrylic to hold everything together. Galfenol works well, but you need to make it in an inert helium atmosphere and then post process it using (insert classified patent here) to make it oriented in one plane.
Galfenol is easy to make, you just need gallium metal and iron filings
Registered Member #1316
Joined: Thu Feb 14 2008, 03:35AM
Location: Cambridge, MA
Posts: 365
If you look up the app notes for piezoelectric transformers, you will see they use a phase lock loop to track the resonant frequency and regulate power by detuning through a phase shift.
For a project I made my own driver and made some low voltage piezoelectric transformers from raw piezoelectric material. I can upload the schematic of my PLL based driver if you want. When configured properly it can also track the maximum power/voltage point.
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Piezo inverters
