Piezoelectric Material A Way to Energy

Harvesting
Md. Mehedi Rahman Khan ; Roll: 232
Md. Mahmudul Hasan ; Roll: 230

Institute of Energy, Dhaka University

 Introduction:

We've probably used piezoelectricity (pronounced "pee-ay-zo-electricity") quite a few times today. A
quartz watch, piezoelectricity is what helps it keep regular time. Writing a letter or an essay on computer
with the help of voice recognition software, the microphone we spoke into probably used piezoelectricity
to turn the sound energy in our voice into electrical signals our computer could interpret. If you're a bit of
an audiophile and like listening to music on vinyl, your gramophone would have been using
piezoelectricity to "read" the sounds from your LP records. Piezoelectricity (literally, "pressing electricity")
is much simpler than it sounds: it just means using crystals to convert mechanical energy into electricity
or vice-versa. Let's take a closer look at how it works and why it's so useful!

Resources around us are not infinite, with certain time and use all become to diminish. The main challenge
of micro to macro scale devices is to produce clean and efficient power. Some devices which have been
significantly developed for micro scale power supplies. Some of these devices are combustors, solar cells,
fuel cells, thermoelectric devices, and thin film and micro–batteries. Like other developed countries, USA
began to using these devices to make the oil consumption lower in industrial and commercial fields. This
device also provides clean energy means no pollution on the environment. Now developed countries are
concerned about to use renewable energy more than conventional fuel energies. And now in recent times
specifically piezoelectric energy-harvesting devices, which is becoming an area of increased interest. The
interesting fact about piezoelectric material is that, it can produce energy from any kind of wasted. It is a
source of free energy. In this paper we will explore some combined way of energy harvesting using
piezoelectric materials and also to show a new way to minimize the electricity problem in an economic
manner.

What is piezoelectricity?

Squeeze certain crystals (such as quartz) and you can make electricity flow through them. The reverse is
usually true as well: if you pass electricity through the same crystals, they "squeeze themselves" by
vibrating back and forth. That's pretty much piezoelectricity in a nutshell but, for the sake of science, let's
have a formal definition:

Piezoelectricity (also called the piezoelectric effect) is the appearance of an electrical potential (a voltage,
in other words) across the sides of a crystal when you subject it to mechanical stress (by squeezing it).

In practice, the crystal becomes a kind of tiny battery with a positive charge on one face and a negative
charge on the opposite face; current flows if we connect the two faces together to make a circuit. In the
reverse piezoelectric effect, a crystal becomes mechanically stressed (deformed in shape) when a voltage
is applied across its opposite faces.
 What causes piezoelectricity?

Think of a crystal and you probably picture balls (atoms) mounted on bars (the bonds that hold them
together), a bit like a climbing frame. Now, by crystals, scientists don't necessarily mean intriguing bits of
rock you find in gift shops: a crystal is the scientific name for any solid whose atoms or molecules are
arranged in a very orderly way based on endless repetitions of the same basic atomic building block (called
the unit cell). So a lump of iron is just as much of a crystal as a piece of quartz. In a crystal, what we have
is actually less like a climbing frame (which doesn't necessarily have an orderly, repeating structure) and
more like three-dimensional, patterned wallpaper.

Diagram showing the regular arrangement of atoms in a crystalline solid.

Artwork: What scientists mean by a crystal: the regular, repeating arrangement of atoms in a solid. The
atoms are essentially fixed in place but can vibrate slightly.

In most crystals (such as metals), the unit cell (the basic repeating unit) is symmetrical; in piezoelectric
crystals, it isn't. Normally, piezoelectric crystals are electrically neutral: the atoms inside them may not be
symmetrically arranged, but their electrical charges are perfectly balanced: a positive charge in one place
cancels out a negative charge nearby. However, if you squeeze or stretch a piezoelectric crystal, you
deform the structure, pushing some of the atoms closer together or further apart, upsetting the balance
of positive and negative, and causing net electrical charges to appear. This effect carries through the
whole structure so net positive and negative charges appear on opposite, outer faces of the crystal.

The reverse-piezoelectric effect occurs in the opposite way. Put a voltage across a piezoelectric crystal
and you're subjecting the atoms inside it to "electrical pressure." They have to move to rebalance
themselves—and that's what causes piezoelectric crystals to deform (slightly change shape) when you put
a voltage across them.

How piezoelectricity works

1. Normally, the charges in a piezoelectric crystal are exactly balanced, even if they're not
symmetrically arranged.
 2. The effects of the charges exactly cancel out, leaving no net charge on the crystal faces. (More
specifically, the electric dipole moments—vector lines separating opposite charges—exactly
cancel one another out.)
3. If you squeeze the crystal (massively exaggerated in this picture!), you force the charges out of
balance.
4. Now the effects of the charges (their dipole moments) no longer cancel one another out and net
positive and negative charges appear on opposite crystal faces. By squeezing the crystal, you've
produced a voltage across its opposite faces—and that's piezoelectricity!

What is piezoelectricity used for?

Photo: A typical piezoelectric transducer. This one is the ringer inside my landline telephone: it makes a particularly
shrill and horrible chirping noise when the phone rings!

There are all kinds of situations where we need to convert mechanical energy (pressure or movement of
some kind) into electrical signals or vice-versa. Often, we can do that with a piezoelectric transducer. A
transducer is simply a device that converts small amounts of energy from one kind into another (for
example, converting light, sound, or mechanical pressure into electrical signals).

In ultrasound equipment, a piezoelectric transducer converts electrical energy into extremely rapid
mechanical vibrations—so fast, in fact, that it makes sounds, but ones too high-pitched for our ears to
hear. These ultrasound vibrations can be used for scanning, cleaning, and all kinds of other things.

In a microphone, we need to convert sound energy (waves of pressure traveling through the air) into
electrical energy—and that's something piezoelectric crystals can help us with. Simply stick the vibrating
part of the microphone to a crystal and, as pressure waves from your voice arrive, they'll make the crystal
move back and forth, generating corresponding electrical signals. The "needle" in a gramophone
(sometimes called a record player) works in the opposite way. As the diamond-tipped needle rides along
the spiral groove in your LP, it bumps up and down. These vibrations push and pull on a lightweight
piezoelectric crystal, producing electrical signals that your stereo then converts back into audible sounds.
Photo: Record-player stylus (photographed from underneath): If you're still playing LP records, you'll use a stylus like
this to convert the mechanical bumps on the record into sounds you can hear. The stylus (silver horizontal bar)
contains a tiny diamond crystal (the little dot on the end at the right) that bounces up and down in the record groove.
The vibrations distort a piezoelectric crystal inside the yellow cartridge that produces electrical signals, which are
amplified to make the sounds you can hear.

In a quartz clock or watch, the reverse-piezoelectric effect is used to keep time very precisely. Electrical
energy from a battery is fed into a crystal to make it oscillate thousands of times a second. The watch then
uses an electronic circuit to turn that into slower, once-per-second beats that a tiny motor and some
precision gears use to drive the second, minute, and hour hands around the clock-face.

Piezoelectricity is also used, much more crudely, in spark lighters for gas stoves and barbecues. Press a
lighter switch and you'll hear a clicking sound and see sparks appear. What you're doing, when you press
the switch, is squeezing a piezoelectric crystal, generating a voltage, and making a spark fly across a small
gap.

If you've got an inkjet printer sitting on your desk, it's using precision "syringes" to squirt droplets of ink
onto the paper. Some inkjets squirt their syringes using electronically controlled piezoelectric crystals,
which squeeze their "plungers" in and out; Canon Bubble Jets fire their ink by heating it instead. (You'll
find more details of both methods in our article about inkjet printers.)

Energy harvesting with piezoelectricity?

If you can make a tiny bit of electricity by pressing one piezoelectric crystal once, could you make a
significant amount by pressing many crystals over and over again? What if we buried crystals under city
streets and pavements to capture energy as cars and people passed by? This idea, which is known as
energy harvesting, has caught many people's interest. Inventors have proposed all kinds of ideas for
storing energy with hidden piezoelectric devices, from shoes that convert your walking movements into
heat to keep your feet warm, and cellphones that charge themselves from your body movements, to roads
that power streetlights, contact lenses that capture energy when you blink, and even gadgets that make
energy from the pressure of falling rain.

Artwork: Energy harvesting? Inventors have been filing lots of patents for wearable gadgets that will generate small
amounts of electricity from your body movements. This example is a shoe with a built-in piezoelectric transducer (1)
that springs up and down as you walk, sending electricity to a circuit (2) and then storing it in a battery (3).

Is energy harvesting a good idea? At first sight, anything that minimizes waste energy and improves
efficiency sounds really sensible. If you could use the floor of a grocery store to capture energy from the
feet of hurrying shoppers pushing their heavy carts, and use that to power the store's lights or its chiller
cabinets, surely that must be a good thing? Sometimes energy harvesting can indeed provide a decent, if
rather modest, amount of power.

The trouble is, however, that energy harvesting schemes can be a big distraction from better ideas.
Consider, for example, the concept of building streets with piezoelectric "rumble strips" that soak up
energy from passing traffic. Cars are extremely inefficient machines and only a small amount (15 percent
or so) of the energy in their fuel powers you down the road. Only a fraction of this fraction is available for
recovery from the road—and you wouldn't be able to recover all that fraction with 100 percent efficiency.
So the amount of energy you could practically recover, and the efficiency gain you would make for the
money you spent, would be minuscule. If you really want to save energy from cars, the sensible way to do
it is to address the inefficiencies of car transportation much earlier in the process; for example, by
designing engines that are more efficient, encouraging people to car share, swapping from gasoline
engines to electric cars, and things of that sort.

That's not to say that energy harvesting has no place; it could be really useful for charging mobile devices
using energy that would otherwise go to waste. Imagine a cellphone that charged itself automatically
every time it jiggled around in your pocket, for example. Even so, when it comes to saving energy, we
should always consider the bigger picture and make sure the time and money we invest is producing the
best possible results.
 Types of Piezoelectric Materials

With their amazing characteristic to produce electricity from unused vibrations of the devices,
piezoelectric materials are emerging as revolutionary power harvesters. Owing to the research done on
these materials, today there is a wide range of piezoelectric materials to choose from. The different types
of piezoelectric materials include the following.

1. Natural Existing

These crystals are anisotropic dielectrics with non-centrosymmetric crystal lattice. Crystal materials like
Quartz, Rochelle salt, Topaz, Tourmaline-group minerals, and some organic substances as silk, wood,
enamel, bone, hair, rubber, dentin comes under this category.

2. Manmade Synthetic Materials

Materials with ferroelectric properties are used to prepare piezoelectric materials. Manmade materials
are group into five main categories – Quartz analogs, Ceramics, Polymers, Composites, and Thin Films.

• Polymers: Polyvinylidene difluoride, PVDF or PVF2.

• Composites: Piezocomposites are the upgrade of piezopolymers. They can be of two types:
Piezo polymer in which piezoelectric material is immersed in an electrically passive matrix.
Piezo composites that are made by using two different ceramics example BaTiO3 fibers reinforcing a PZT
matrix.

• Manmade piezoelectric with crystal structure as perovskite: Barium titanate, Lead titanate, Lead
zirconate titanate (PZT), Potassium niobate, Lithium niobate, Lithium tantalate, and other lead-
free piezoelectric ceramics.

Properties of Different Piezoelectric Materials

Quartz

• Quartz is the most popular single crystal piezoelectric material. Single crystal materials exhibit
different material properties depending on the cut and direction of the bulk wave propagation.
Quartz oscillator operated in thickness shear mode of the AT-cut are used in computers, TV’s and
VCR’s.
• In S.A.W. devices ST-cut quartz with X-propagation is used. Quartz has extremely high mechanical
quality factor QM > 105.

Lithium Niobate and Lithium Tantalate

• These materials are composed of oxygen octahedron.

• Curies temperature of these materials is 1210 and 6600c respectively.
• These materials have a high electromechanical coupling coefficient for surface acoustic wave.

Barium Titanate

• These materials with dopants such as Pb or Ca ions can stabilize the tetragonal phase over a wider
temperature range.
• These are initially used for Langevin -type piezoelectric vibrators.

PZT

• Doping PZT with donor ions such as Nb5+ or Tr5+ provides soft PZT’s like PZT-5.
• Doping PZT with acceptor ions such as Fe3+ or Sc3+ provides hard PZT’s like PZT-8.

Lead Titanate Ceramic

• These can produce clear ultrasonic imaging because of there extremely low planar coupling.
• Recently, for ultrasonic transducers and electromechanical actuators single crystal relaxor
ferroelectrics with morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) are being developed.

Piezoelectric Polymers

Piezoelectric polymers have certain common characteristics as:

• Small piezoelectric d constant which makes them a good choice for the actuator.
• Large g constant which makes them a good choice as sensors.
• These materials have good acoustic impedance matching with water or human body due to there
light weight and soft elasticity.
 • Broad resonance bandwidth due to low QM.
• These materials are highly-opted for directional microphones and ultrasonic hydrophones.

Piezoelectric Composites

• Piezoelectric composites made up of piezoelectric ceramic and polymer phases form excellent
piezoelectric materials
• High coupling factor, low acoustic impedance, mechanical flexibility characterizes these materials.
• These materials are especially used for underwater sonar and medical diagnostic ultrasonic
transducer applications.

Thin films

For bulk acoustic and surface acoustic wave devices thin films of ZnO are widely used because of there
large piezoelectric coupling.

Which is the Best Piezoelectric Material?

Piezoelectric materials are chosen based on the requirement of our applications. The material that could
easily meet our requirement can be considered the best. There are a few factors to be considered while
choosing piezoelectric materials.

The five important merits of piezoelectric are:

1. The electromechanical coupling factor k

k2 = (Stored mechanical energy / Input electrical energy) or

k2 = (Stored electrical energy / Input mechanical energy)

2. Piezoelectric strain constant d

Describes the relation of magnitude of induced strain x to the electric field E as x = d.E.

3. Piezoelectric voltage constant g

g defines the relation between the external stress X and induced electric field E as E = g.X.

Using the relation P = d.X. we can state g = d/ε0 .ε. where ε = permittivity.
 4. Mechanical quality factor QM

This parameter characterizes the sharpness of the electromechanical resonance system.

QM= ω0/2 ω.

5. Acoustic Impedance Z

This parameter evaluates the acoustic energy transfer between two materials. This is defined as

Z2 = (pressure/volume velocity).

In solid materials Z = √ρ.√ϲ where ρ is the density and ϲ is the elastic stiffness of the material.

Piezoelectric Characteristics Table

Characteristics Symbol BaTiO3 PVDF

UNIT PZT

1,78
Density – 5,7 7,5
103kg/m3

Relative 12
– 1700 1200
Permittivity ε/ε0

23
Piezoelectric d31 78 110
10-12C/N

216
g31 10-3Vm/N 5 10
Constant

Voltage 12
k31 at 1kHz 21 30
Constant

• Polymers have low piezoelectric constant compared to ceramics.

• Shape change of ceramic-based materials is more than that of polymer-based materials when the same
amount of voltage is applied.
• Piezoelectric voltage coefficient of PVDF makes is a better material for sensor applications.
• Due to the larger electromechanical coupling coefficient, PZT is used in an application where
mechanical stress has to be converted to electrical energy.
• Three parameters to be considered for selecting piezoelectric materials for applications working under
mechanical resonance are the mechanical quality factor, electromechanical coupling factor,
 and dielectric constant. Higher the magnitude of these parameters best is the material for the
application.
• Materials with large piezoelectric strain coefficient, large non-hysteretic strain levels are best for an
actuator.
• Materials with high electromechanical coupling factor and high dielectric permittivity are best
as transducers.
• Low dielectric loss is important for materials used in off-resonance frequency applications accounting
for low heat generation.

Reference

Articles

1. Better Ultrasound Imaging and Sonar Through Samarium by Charles Q. Choi. IEEE Spectrum, 18
April 2019. Samarium allows piezoelectric transducers to generate much more charge, potentially
giving medical imaging equipment much higher resolution (showing more detail).
2. A Fitbit for the Stomach by Megan Scudellari. IEEE Spectrum, 11 October 2017. Researchers
develop a piezoelectric stomach sensor.
3. Good Vibrations? California to Test Using Road Rumbles as a Power Source by Philip E. Ross. IEEE
Spectrum, 19 April 2017. Could piezoelectric rumble-strips generate useful amounts of power?
Given how much energy cars waste in converting fuel to motion, thinking about harvesting a tiny
fraction of this energy could, itself, be a waste of (mental) energy.
4. Energy harvesting fibre invented at University of Bolton: BBC News, 28 June 2011. Flexible,
piezoelectric fibers could be sewn into your clothes to charge your MP3 player or cellphone as
you move around!
5. Future Helicopters Get SMART: NASA, 25 February 2009. NASA scientists think piezoelectric
blades could make helicopters quieter and more economical.
6. A step closer to self-powered kit: BBC News, 4 December, 2008. Describes how small, piezoelectric
generators could be used to make a variety of self-powered gadgets.
7. Implant may help deaf hear music: BBC News, 19 October 2005. How piezoelectric materials are
being used in new cochlear implants to improve deaf people's hearing.

Books

1. Piezoelectric Materials: Applications in SHM, Energy Harvesting and Biomechanics by Suresh

Bhalla, Sumedha Moharana, Naveet Kaur, and Visalakshi Talakokula. Wiley/Athena, 2017. An up-
to-date introduction that connects theoretical aspects of piezoelectricity with practical
applications in medicine and energy production.
2. Piezoelectric Ceramics: Principles and Applications: APC International, Ltd. 2011. A pithy (114-
page) introduction to the principles of piezoelectricity and how it's used in different kinds of
generators, sensors, actuators, and transducers.
3. The Beginnings of Piezoelectricity: A Study in Mundane Physics by Shaul Katzir. Springer, 2011. A
fascinating historical account of how the piezoelectric effect was discovered and explained by a
variety of different theories and models.
4. Piezoelectricity: Evolution and Future of a Technology by Walter Heywang, Karl Lubitz, and
Wolfram Wersing. Springer, 2008. What is piezoelectricity and how can we apply it in medicine,
defense, and other important areas of society?