PI Ceramic: 30 Years of Excellence in Piezo Transducer, Actuator, and Motor Design & Production

Sophisticated piezoceramic components and subsystems with new piezo transducer offerings for sensing and ultrasound applications.

PI Ceramic, a subsidiary of precision motion control specialist PI (Physik Instrumente), celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2022 and continues to provide world-class standard and miniaturized piezoceramic components such as piezo rings, piezo benders, micro piezo tubes, micro disks, and shear transducer plates. Piezo components are critical for markets such as 3D printing, digital printing, medical engineering, and industrial automation. Founded in 1992 as a subsidiary of PI (Physik Instrumente), PI Ceramic (PIC) was started with a handful of employees - all experts in the field of piezoceramic and dielectric materials - who brought with them decades of research, design, and production experience.

Continuous Growth, 3rd Expansion
Only two years after inception, the PI Ceramic team moved to a new building specifically designed for their needs. Due to the continuous global demand for the high-performance piezoceramic transducers, actuators, and motors designed and manufactured at PIC, the company kept growing and the facilities had to be extended several times since its founding. The most recent expansion in 2020 added more than 80,000 square feet of manufacturing and office space.

Compact Piezo Actuators that Survive 100 Billion Cycles Without Failures - Good Enough for NASA
In the early 2000's, PIC developed a new type of piezo material and process for multilayer piezo actuator production. Based on several novel ideas, PIC's patented, ceramic-encapsulated actuators can provide significantly longer service life than conventional polymer coated piezoelectric actuators. In a long-term test for the Mars Mission, NASA tested several actuator types to find the toughest ones with the highest performance. PI Ceramic's PICMA® actuators had passed 100 Billion Cycles of life tests without failure and degradation and got selected.

Lead-Free Piezoceramic Materials for Future Applications and Markets
PI Ceramic's competency in acoustic designs including piezo transducer spheres and hemisphere and the portfolio for ultrasonic applications will continue to expand. PI Ceramic's material specialists have already invested in intensive research and started to produce lead-free piezoceramic and composite transducers for new markets.

This compact 3D camera series combines a very short working distance, a large field of view and a high depth of field - perfect for bin picking applications. With its ability to capture multiple objects over a large area, it can help robots empty containers more efficiently. Now available from IDS Imaging Development Systems. In the color version of the Ensenso B, the stereo system is equipped with two RGB image sensors. This saves additional sensors and reduces installation space and hardware costs. Now, you can also choose your model to be equipped with two 5 MP mono sensors, achieving impressively high spatial precision. With enhanced sharpness and accuracy, you can tackle applications where absolute precision is essential. The great strength of the Ensenso B lies in the very precise detection of objects at close range. It offers a wide field of view and an impressively high depth of field. This means that the area in which an object is in focus is unusually large. At a distance of 30 centimetres between the camera and the object, the Z-accuracy is approx. 0.1 millimetres. The maximum working distance is 2 meters. This 3D camera series complies with protection class IP65/67 and is ideal for use in industrial environments.