molybdenum and tungsten dichalcogenides, some of which have been predicted to have larger piezoelectric coefficients than MoS2 (ref. 3). Piezoelectricity has been reported in few-layer C3N4 nanosheets7. Future work may involve the study of higher-order electromechanical effects in few-layer materials that have potential to generate curvature in membranes5. The atomically thin nature of these ma...

Due to issues with Pb toxicity, there is an urgent need for high performance Pb-free alternatives to Pb-based piezoelectric ceramics. Although pure BaTiO3 material exhibits fairly low piezoelectric coefficients, further designing of such a material system greatly enhances the piezoelectric response by means of domain engineering, defects engineering, as well as phase boundary engineering. Espec...

Piezoelectric transformers (PTs) are solid-state devices that transform electrical energy into electrical energy by means of a mechanical vibration. These devices are manufactured using piezoelectric materials that are driven at resonance. With appropriate design and circuitry, it is possible to step up and step down the voltages between the input and output sections of the piezoelectric transf...

Aurivillius oxides family has attracted great interest in the last years due to their promising electrical properties as high temperature piezoelectric materials. Piezoelectric materials that could operate in extreme conditions of use (elevated temperatures and hostile environments) could be of particular interest for different technological applications. Furthermore, increasing concerns for en...

energy harvesting from surrounding environment has been attractive for many researchers in recent years. therefore, developing appropriate test apparatus to study energy harvesting mechanisms and their performance is of paramount importance. due to their electromechanical characteristics, piezoelectric materials are used for harvesting energy from environmental vibrations. for optimum utilizati...

Piezoelectric materials are used in many engineering application. When modeling piezoelectric materials the standard assumption is that the electromagnetic field which is used to actuate the piezoelectric material is quasi static. In this paper we show that although the assumption of a quasi static electrical field is valid when one is interested in simulating a piezoelectric material, this ass...

Despite the significant potential of organic piezoelectric materials in the electro-mechanical or mechano-electrical applications that require light and flexible material properties, the intrinsically low piezoelectric performance as compared to traditional inorganic materials has limited their full utilization. In this study, we demonstrate that dimensional reduction of poly(vinylidene fluorid...

The usefulness of most high technology devices such as cell phones, computers, and sensors is limited by the storage capacity of batteries. In the future, these limitations will become more pronounced as the demand for wireless power outpaces battery development which is already nearly optimized. Thus, new power generation techniques are required for the next generation of wearable computers, w...

Piezoelectric materials capable of converting between mechanical and electrical energy have a great range of potential applications in micro- and nano-scale smart devices; however, their performance tends to be greatly degraded when reduced to a thin film due to the large clamping force by the substrate and surrounding materials. Herein, we report an effective method for synthesizing isolated p...

In this paper we show that experimentally realizable apparently piezoelectric thin-film superlattices can be created from nonpiezoelectric materials provided an odd-order e.g., trilayer stacking sequence is used. The size-dependent mechanism of flexoelectricity, which couples gradients of strain to polarization, allows such a possibility. We present closed-form analytical expressions for the re...