help designing voltage amplifier for piezoelectric

[hiwords]

hi everybody, this is my first post and i'll put it out there right now, i'm not very good with circuits. i'm an industrial engineering and we only have basic knowledge of circuits. i'm working on a senior design project with a group of MEs. we're designing a smart actuator. the actuator is going to have patches of piezoelectric material that we're going to apply a voltage to make it bend. i'm in charge of building a voltage amplifier. we need the amp because we're using LabView and a DAQ device to control the actuator. the link for the DAQ device is at the bottom. as you can see from the spec chart it puts out very low voltage. what i need is an amp that will bump the DAQ device voltage up to a range of 5-30V. we're building this on a very low budget so if you could please help me design something that is very low cost. i'm going to take the circuit design, buy the parts and hand solder it on a printed circuit board we're getting from radioshack. if anybody could please help me design this amp i would really appreciate it.


NI USB 6501 (USB, 24-ch, 8.5 mA) - Low Cost USB Digital I/O Device - National Instruments

 

[Externet]

I'll bite...

What is the amount of bending (a thousand of an inch?) in what time (a millisecond?) should bend?

Any decently powered home stereo should perform to do tests with a piezoelectric element at audio frequencies. If that is what you want, then you can select a cheap amplifier module and attach a transformer at the output to raise the voltage.

If the bending must hold for long times, nitinol is the way to go, and an adjustable DC power supply can do it instead of an amplifier.

Your post does not tell much of your intentions. More information is needed. What is the input frequency to the amplifier ?