How are the behaviors of piezoelectric inertial sliders interpreted?

We report on the effect of different driving signal waveforms on the positioning response of piezoelectric inertial sliders. Surprisingly, a delayed retraction waveform is found to perform better than the more widely adopted undelayed retraction, which is opposite to the expected behavior because the former has a less sharp turning point with lower inertial force. This is confirmed in both piezoelectric tube driven and shear piezo stack driven inertial sliders. We explain that this effect is owing to the creeping property of piezoelectric materials, as indicated by our simulated response including the creeping effect.