There is evidence to support the claim that speedbreakers can cause accidents and injury. When a vehicle approaches a speed-breaker at a speed greater than some threshold velocity, the risk of accident or injury is substantial. Speed-breakers are inconspicuous in low visibility conditions, like at night, or when there is fog, rain or snow. This problem is particularly acute in developing countr...

0167-9317/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier B.V. A doi:10.1016/j.mee.2011.02.080 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0 832 295726; fa E-mail addresses: [email protected], simopetro In this work the micro-fabrication of flexible MicroElectroMechanical transducers based on the piezoelectric effect is reported. We developed the technological protocol to realize a piezoelectric transducer composed...

Abstract: Electromechanical coupling defines the ratio of electrical and mechanical energy exchanged during a flexure cycle of a piezoelectric actuator. This paper presents an analysis of the dynamic electromechanical coupling factor (dynamic EMCF) for cantilever based piezoelectric actuators and provides for the first time explicit expressions for calculation of dynamic EMCF based on arrangeme...

ABSTRACT: This work investigates the fundamental growth of c-axis oriented piezoelectric AlN thin films by RF reactive sputtering on p-type (100) and (110) silicon substrates. Substrates are treated with a 1% HF solution before deposition to remove the native oxide followed by backsputtering using argon ions. X-ray diffraction shows a (0001) oriented columnar texture of AlN grains which is the ...

We studied the dependence of the output of the piezoelectric nanogenerator (NG) on the inclining orientation of the ZnO nanowire arrays (NWAs). The oblique-aligned NWAs were grown by combing a modified oblique-angle sputtering technique for preparing the seed layer and hydrothermal growth. The piezoelectric output of the NWAs was studied by scanning the tip of an atomic force microscope along f...

This paper presents a new approach for the use of piezoelectric materials, PVDF and PZT, for vibration attenuation of a planar parallel manipulator. Since lightweight linkages of parallel manipulators deform under high acceleration/deceleration, such motion induced vibration would have to be damped quickly to reduce settling time of the platform position. An active damping controller is develop...

The ability to measure pressure and force is essential in biomedical applications such as minimally invasive surgery (MIS) and palpation for detecting cancer cysts. Here, we report a force sensor for measuring a shear and normal force by combining an arrayed piezoelectric sensors layer with a precut glass top plate connected by four stress concentrating legs. We designed and fabricated a thin f...

1. Abstract A new integrated grasping tool for minimally invasive surgery has been designed consisting of two piezoelectric bimorph actuators. To improve the force and deflection performance of the bimorphs, a segmented design with varying piezoelectric layer thicknesses is proposed, and an optimization procedure developed for sizing the section thicknesses. Design of experiments and response s...

Current models of non-linear electromechanical behaviours of piezoactuators are mostly intended for actuator configurations where the strain of the piezoelectric material is directly used as the linear output. On the other hand, in the design of piezoactuators, there exist non-trivial configurations where the internal strains of the piezoelectric materials manifest externally in the form of ben...

The development of energy harvesting devices with piezoelectric transducers has been widely studied in the last decade. Most of previous studies considered a resonant cantilever beam with an attached tip mass and focused on the proper modeling of the cantilever device, design and optimization of electric harvesting circuit and nonlinear amplification of resonant vibration amplitude. However, fe...