The long history of innovation in the field piezoelectric devices has, over last 65 years, been predominantly rooted a single material, Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 ceramic, known as lead zirconate titanate (PZT). Despite enormous resources being dedicated 20 years to identifying lead-free alternatives PZT and developing thriving, but limited, market PbTiO3-relaxor crystals, most device developments are still ...

This study presents a generic TITOP (Two-Input Two-Output Port) model of a substructure actuated with embedded piezoelectric materials as actuators (PEAs), previously modeled with the FE technique. This allows intuitive assembly of actuated flexible substructures in large flexible multi-body systems. The modeling technique is applied to an illustrative example of a flexible beam with bonded pie...

The control of electromechanical responses within bonding regions is essential to face frontier challenges in nanotechnologies, such as molecular electronics and biotechnology. Here, we present Iβ-nanocellulose as a potentially new orthotropic 2D piezoelectric crystal. The predicted in-layer piezoelectricity is originated on a sui-generis hydrogen bonds pattern. Upon this fact and by using a co...

While commonly used piezoelectric materials contain lead, non-hazardous, high-performance piezoelectrics are yet to be discovered. Charged domain walls in ferroelectrics are considered inactive with regards to the piezoelectric response and, therefore, are largely ignored in this search. Here we demonstrate a mechanism that leads to a strong enhancement of the dielectric and piezoelectric prope...

Polyamide 11(PA 11)/sodium niobate nanowire (NW) 0–3 composites with different volume fractions of NWs were synthesized. The electric polarization (P ) was measured as a function of the applied electric field (E). The P –E hysteresis loop was used to work out the remanent polarization Pr of these materials. The dielectric permittivity and the piezoelectric strain constant were determined. Good ...

An experimental evaluation of the structural health monitoring capability of piezoelectric wafer active sensors on composite structures at cryogenic temperatures is presented. The piezoelectric wafer active sensor–based electromechanical impedance and the pitch–catch methods were first qualified for cryogenic temperatures using piezoelectric wafer active sensor–instrumented composite specimens ...

Biomaterials are used as model systems for the deposition of functional inorganic materials under mild reaction conditions where organic templates direct the deposition process. In this study, this principle was adapted for the formation of piezoelectric ZnO thin films. The influence of two different organic templates (namely, a carboxylate-terminated self-assembled monolayer and a sulfonate-te...

We study a parallelized flapping piezo-leaf generator for harvesting ambient wind energy and demonstrate an initial design. We fabricated prototypes in various configurations and performed a series of experiments to study performance trends. We propose a novel vertical-stalk L-shape design that exhibits improved output power density over horizontal piezoelectric configurations. While a signific...