The Application of Classical Control in the Design and Analysis of Power Amplifiers for Driving Piezoelectric Stack Actuators
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I do not see any scientific novelty in the work.
Elementary and well-known concepts are described in the paper.
It looks like a final project dissertation at the university instead of being a scientific paper.
English style is generally very poor.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
>It is only a minor suggestion. A section of the paper is not commonly started with a figure.
>Why is the lowercase letter used in sentence (line 53, line 59)?
>The introduction should present additional information related to the design concepts that can be used for this plant.
>Could you explain the value and constancy of the 'RL' parameter (equation 6)?
>Figure 7 and figure 9 are quite similar. Is repeating these diagrams justified?
>How were the parameters mentioned in table 1 identified?
>According to sentence in line 204, the analysis (figure 10) is prepared for the open loop. Then considerations related to the closed loop are presented. It should be clarified.
>The influence of the gain in the control loop on the root locus should be presented.
>The dynamics analysis and relation to the root locus is interesting.
>Details of simulations performed in PSpice should be shown.
>The legend in figures is not clear (the quality of figures, e.g. figure 31)?
>How does the control system work under other frequency of the reference signal (simulations)?
>Can we observe work of the control structure under changes of the load (e.g. CL)?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The study of power amplifiers is interesting and worth pursuing. The authors proposed a new method to design power amplifiers for driving piezoelectric stack actuators. The power amplifiers were designed and simulated and tested. The experimental data were compared with the simulation data and well discussed in the manuscript. A couple of points for the authors:
- The statement “the -3dB bandwidth is about 42 kHz in Figure 11” seems confused, from Figure 11, the -3dB bandwidth should be larger than 1.7 MHz, please explain how to obtain the -3dB bandwidth values for all the cases in the manuscript.
- There are many English grammar errors in the manuscript, for example, “There are some researches have done such work”, please check the manuscript carefully and make the corrections.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
My comments remain the same as before. No remarkable scientific results for a journal paper.
Author Response
Comments and Suggestions for Authors: My comments remain the same as before. No remarkable scientific results for a journal paper.
Response 1:
Everyone has different understandings about innovation. Innovation always has different forms.
Proposing new theory which does not exist before is innovative. There are scattered theories, and
proposing a systematic method to solve problems is innovative. There used to be a complex
method, but now a simple one is proposed to solve the same problem, which is also an innovation.
This paper introduces classical control theory to design power amplifiers for driving piezoelectric
stack actuators, and the proposed method has solved the problem (it is hard to drive large
capacitors) systematically. Moreover, the proposed method is very simple, it can be understood by
almost every engineer who has learned control theory and circuit theory, and it can be applied in
the engineer practice easily. These are scientific results of the paper in my opinion. Some scientific
results in mentioned papers are similar to this paper, which is tiny but meaningful. Reference [14]
applies high-voltage operational amplifiers to design power amplifiers for driving piezoelectric
stack actuators directly, and the method may be introduced by every textbook. Reference [15]
designs a power amplifier for driving piezoelectric stack actuators by simulation, and the reference
does not offer much theoretical analysis. These works have been proved to be innovative as they
have solved some problems simply, and they have been published in SCI journal. It cannot be
denied that the English style is very poor, so that I rewrite some part of the paper again.
