In recent years, inkjet technology has played an important role in industrial materials printing and various sensors fabrication, but the mechanisms of the inkjet print head should be researched more elaborately. The steady state deformation analysis of a tubular piezoelectric print head, which can be classified as a plane strain problem because the radii of the tubes are considerably smaller than the lengths, is discussed in this paper. The geometric structure and the boundary conditions are all axisymmetric, so a one-dimensional mathematical model is constructed. By solving the model, the deformation field and stress field, as well as the electric potential distribution of the piezoelectric tube and glass tube, are obtained. The results show that the deformations are on the nanometer scale, the hoop stress is larger than the radial stress on the whole, and the potential is not linearly distributed along the radial direction. An experiment is designed to validate these computations. A discussion of the effect of the tubes' thicknesses on the system deformation status is provided.
Keywords: glass tube; piezoelectric tube; tubular piezoelectric print head; wall thickness.