Review on high-performance piezoelectric actuators for extreme manufacturing: strategies for scale, speed, force, degrees of freedom, and accuracy

Piezoelectric actuators (PEAs) have been widely used in high-end and intelligent equipment, such as spacecraft, advanced medical instruments, and precision machine tools, owing to the advantages of high accuracy, fast response, flexible structure, and no electromagnetic interference. Extreme manufacturing increasingly demands not only high performance in individual metrics but also their concurrent realization within a unified actuation system. A single PEA operating in different modes exhibits unique performance advantages but lacks combinations. Therefore, improving a single metric and optimizing multiple metrics in coordination are important approaches to broadening the applications of PEAs. This work summarizes high-performance implementation strategies for PEAs from five aspects of scale, speed, force, degrees of freedom (DOF), and accuracy. The work also elaborates on the bottlenecks encountered in improving the five performance aspects, explains the origins of the performance improvement challenges from the actuation principle, and discusses the impact of different strategies on overall performance. Finally, the outlook and prospects of the performance improvement technologies for PEAs are outlined, aiming to provide a theoretical framework and research route for high-performance implementation. The significance of systematic performance improvement strategies for PEAs resides in promoting cutting-edge development in intelligent actuation while exploring novel actuation strategies for multi-scenario and multi-demand extreme manufacturing.