Effect of friction on the performance of inertial slider

Inertial sliders are friction based drives used to position with a resolution of a few hundred of nanometers to over a range of few millimeters. The compactness and simple construction enabled it to be used as a coarse positioner in various Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPM). Even heavy masses has been thought off earlier to use the inertial slider to position precisely, lack of understanding in the dynamical friction behaviour has been the main reason why the inertial sliders potential has not been explored fully in any practical device. In this paper, we have studied the effect of different operating parameters on the step size of the slider. The inertial mass is kept on three sapphire balls, which are attached to shear piezoelectric material. The behaviour of inertial mass was studied for different input waveforms and different surface conditions that come in contact with the sapphire balls. It was observed that under lubricated conditions the step size was reduced.