Solar cells are produced using solution processing that combine ZnO nanorods with the conjugated polymer poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT). ZnO nanorods have an average length and diameter of 2.7 μm and 81 nm, and are well coated with P3HT. The solar cells have a power conversion efficiency of 1.24 %, which increases to 1.78 % when 10 kHz acoustic vibrations are applied to the device at 75 dB using...

This paper reviews kinetic energy harvesting as a potential localised power supply for wireless applications. Harvesting devices are typically implemented as resonant devices of which the power output depends upon the size of the inertial mass, the frequency and amplitude of the driving vibrations, the maximum available mass displacement and the damping. Three transduction mechanisms are curren...

Presence of speech and motion artifacts has been shown to impact the performance of wearable sensor systems used for automatic detection of food intake. This work presents a novel wearable device which can detect food intake even when the user is physically active and/or talking. The device consists of a piezoelectric strain sensor placed on the temporalis muscle, an accelerometer, and a data a...

A new scheme is proposed to measure the electro-optical (EO) and converse-piezoelectric (CPE) coefficients of the PMN-PT ceramics simultaneously, in which the PMN-PT ceramics acts as the guiding layer of a symmetrical metal-cladding waveguide. As the applied electric field exerts on the waveguide, the effective refractive index (RI) (or synchronous angle) can be effectively tuned from a selecte...

This paper describes the optimization of a piezoelectric-driven synthetic jet actuator based on a Lumped Element Modeling (LEM). To simplify the problem, this papers splits the optimization problem into two parts. First, a constrained optimization of the cavity volume and orifice dimensions of two baseline synthetic jets, each with a given piezoelectric diaphragm, is conducted using two differe...

Our eyes are in continuous motion. Even when we attempt to fix our gaze, we produce so called "fixational eye movements", which include microsaccades, drift, and ocular microtremor (OMT). Microsaccades, the largest and fastest type of fixational eye movement, shift the retinal image from several dozen to several hundred photoreceptors and have equivalent physical characteristics to saccades, on...

This paper reports improved screen-printed piezoelectric composites that can be printed on fabrics or flexible substrates. The materials are flexible and are processed at lower temperature (130°C). One main PZT particle size (2μm) was mixed separately with smaller piezoelectric particles (0.1, 0.3 and 0.8μm) with different weight ratios to investigate the piezoelectric property d33. The blended...

OBJECTIVES Ultrasonic scalers have become increasingly popular for subgingival debridement. The aim of the present study was to investigate the influence of different working tip designs (narrow versus wide) on root substance loss caused by either magnetostrictive or piezoelectric ultrasonic devices. METHODS In this in vitro study, a magnetostrictive ultrasonic system with either Slimline or ...

The development of micro-/nano-scaled energy harvesters and the self-powered sensor system has attracted great attention due to the miniaturization and integration of the micro-device. In this work, lead-free NaNbO₃ piezoelectric nanofibers with a monoclinic perovskite structure were synthesized by the far-field electrospinning method. The flexible active humidity sensors were fabricated by tra...