Is a piezoelectric strip flexible when no voltage is supplied to it?
Depends very much on how the strip is constructed. eg glass, and steel, are normally considered rigid materials, but if they are processed/structured differently (fibre optic cable/ spring) then they can be quite flexible Individual Piezo crystals aren’t flexible at all, but if they are mounted on some kind of mechanism, in opposed pairs then it should be possible to use them actuators to bend a strip, with controllable rigidity. (if the individual elements can be controlled separately it should be possible to send a “wave” up/down the strip…) Consider the structure of those toy leather and wooden snakes you can get.A “cylinder” of wood are cut in to thin discs, and then fixed to a leather spine, with a little space between each disc, to allow the leather strip to bend, in a fairly lifelike snake type way (not surprising as it’s very similar to a real snake’s skeleton!) Anyway if you fill the space between discs with (aligned) Piezo crystals (which then can function as “force pistons
