For it to operate underwater, the team
used piezoelectric materials in its construction so that it will be powered by the bobbing of the waves.
Not exact matches
These
materials are also
used in everyday devices, such as loudspeakers, which rely on
piezoelectrics to convert electrical signals to mechanical vibrations which create sound waves to produce the desired acoustic signal.
Another group of collaborators, led by Professor Jiangyu Li at the University of Washington in Seattle, tested the
material using a state of the art apparatus and proved it was, indeed,
piezoelectric.
This new tag
uses a flexible strip containing
piezoelectric materials, which generate electricity through physical movement.
The team
used the strain induced by an electric field applied to a
piezoelectric material (which deforms mechanically in response to an electric field) to manipulate the chirality of the domain wall.
So far, however, attempts to harvest this energy
using vibrating plates or
piezoelectric materials, which produce electricity when compressed or bent, have mustered only a few milliwatts.
The new
materials, which generate an electric field when squeezed, copy the crystal structure of conventional
piezoelectric materials but
use bismuth instead of lead.
Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely
used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds of other devices.
Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely
used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microph... Read more
«We can directly create
piezoelectric materials of the shape we want, where we want them, on flexible substrates for
use in energy harvesting and other applications,» said Nazanin Bassiri - Gharb, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
We have seen
piezoelectric transistors incorporated into synthetic skins making them sensitive enough to read fingerprints, other approaches that
use multipurpose sensors to detect temperature and humidity in addition to pressure, and others that
use pressure - sensitive
materials made from inorganic semiconductors to only
use a small amounts of power.
Abstract:
Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely
used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds of other devices.
Lookman and his colleagues focused on nickel - titanium - based shape - memory alloys, but the strategy can be
used for any
materials class (polymers, ceramics or nanomaterials) or target properties (e.g., dielectric response,
piezoelectric coefficients and band gaps).
This new energy harvesting device
uses an electrochemical process similar to that in lithium ion batteries to produce electricity instead of a physical process like the other
piezoelectric materials, which will likely make it inexpensive to manufacture.
The research team is set to start producing samples of the hybrid photovoltaic -
piezoelectric material using equipment bought through # 1 million funding from The Knowledge Centre for
Materials Chemistry (KCMC).