ABSTRACT

Rare earth alloy Terfenol-D is a new Giant Magnetostrictive Material (GMM) and it was first developed by Iowa Ames laboratory of the United States in the 1980s (Calkin et al. 2000). The expansion coefficient is several times higher than the traditional magnetostrictive material, the response time is less than 1 and has a wider temperature range of application than the piezoelectric ceramic PZT (Zhou 1998). At present, it is very active in all kinds of micro drive fields. The Giant Magnetostrictive Material (GMM) developed in the 1980s, which is a kind of rare earth-iron compound with the magnetostrictive coefficient about 100 to 1000 times higher than the general magnetostrictive material. It has the characteristics of fast response, high power density, wide application and drive and energy transfer (Cao et al. 2003).