Embedded Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) transducers have been widely used in research related to monitoring the health status of concrete structures. This paper presents a dynamic model of an embeddable PZT transducer with a waterproof layer and a protecting layer. The proposed model is verified by finite-element method (FEM). Based on the proposed model, the factors influencing the dynamic prop...

This paper consists of three major topics. The first topic is a review of challenges encountered in PZT thin film fabrication. Currently, sol-gel processing is one of the most promising techniques to fabricate PZT thin films. There are, however, several major challenges, including crack formation, thermally unstable electrodes, and poor piezoelectric properties. The second topic reveals some in...

We have examined the static and dynamic electromechanical responses of PZT–brass (piezoelectric–nonpiezoelectric) plate unimorphs of various brass/PZT thickness ratios. The study was performed both experimentally and theoretically. The static measurements showed that, given a PZT layer thickness, there exists a brass/PZT thickness ratio that gives the unimorph the highest static displacement un...

Piezoelectric ceramic Lead Zirconate Titanate (PZT) based electro-mechanicalimpedance (EMI) technique for structural health monitoring (SHM) has been successfullyapplied to various engineering systems. However, fundamental research work on thesensitivity of the PZT impedance sensors for damage detection is still in need. In thetraditional EMI method, the PZT electro-mechanical (EM) admittance (...

The optical properties of lead zirconate titanate (PZT) thin films deposited on ZnO were studied by m-lines spectroscopy. In order to retrieve the refractive index and the thickness of both layers from the m-lines spectra, we develop a numerical algorithm for the case of a two-layer system and show its robustness in the presence of noise. The sensitivity of the algorithm of the two-layer model ...

Lead-rich intermediate phases, in particular Pt,,Pb and PbO, are found to form on Pt(ll1) atop Ti-buffered Si substrates prior to formation of Pb(Zr, -*TiX)O3 (PZT) thin films. Pt,_,Pb is a [ill] textured transient intermetallic phase that nucleates PZT[111] texture. PbO is a [OOl] textured layer compound that nucleates PZT[100] texture. The formation conditions and lattice matching of these in...

Pulsed laser deposition has been used to grow Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (PZT)/LaNiO3 (LNO) heterostructures with restricted crystallographic orientations on bare Si(001) and SiO2-coated Si(001) substrates, using TiN buffer layers. The effect of background gas pressure on orientation of the thin films was investigated in detail. XRD analyses showed that under optimized conditions, (001)-oriented PZT/LN...

This study proposes trenching piezoelectric (PZT) material in a thicker PZT pyroelectric cell to improve the temperature variation rate to enhance the efficiency of thermal energy-harvesting conversion by pyroelectricity. A thicker pyroelectric cell is beneficial in generating electricity pyroelectrically, but it hinders rapid temperature variations. Therefore, the PZT sheet was fabricated to p...

Calculation of the resonance frequency of cantilevers fabricated from an elastically anisotropic material requires the use of an effective Young’s modulus. In this paper a technique to determine the appropriate effective Young’s modulus for arbitrary cantilever geometries is introduced. This technique is validated using a combined analytical and finite element simulations (FEM) approach. In add...