In this paper, a Micro – Electrical Mechanical System (MEMS) energy harvester is developed, using the phenomenon of Piezoelectricity. Zinc Oxide (ZnO) was chosen as the piezoelectric material. A multi – d31 mode cantilever design was used with varying dimensions of cantilever, to form an array. The individual cantilevers can be either connected in series or parallel to achieve different output ...

This paper presents a tactile sensor that provides transient event information at the jinger-object interface. The multi-element stress rate sensor consists of piezoelectric polymer strips molded into the surface of the rubber “skin“ covering the robot finger tip. These piezoelectric elements provide localized information important to manipulation control. We provide experimental results confir...

mechanical energy, such as vibration into electrical energy which can be used to power up devices in a smart dust sensing network. This piezoelectric mechanism exhibits great potentials to resolve many energy supply problems in sensor network to supply energy to radio frequency (RF) circuits, microcontroller, micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) and sensors placed in remote locations. This pa...

Piezoelectric actuators are widely used in applications of micropositioning. In the most situations, there is a contact with an environment. Existence of external forces is a challenging problem in controlling mechanical system, especially in micro scales such as piezoelectric actuators. In such a situation, dual hysteresis nonlinearity effects could disrupt the actuator micropositioning accura...

A novel, integrated micromechanical actuator based on the principle of undulatory fish locomotion and intended for efficient on-chip cooling or venting applications is conceived and designed for an aluminum nitride-based thin-film technology applying coupled piezoelectric, mechanical, and fluidic analyses. The results of the investigations prove that an undulatory motion of the fin-like micro-f...

Super-dense transfected cell microarrays (TCMs) were created by a piezoelectric inkjet printer on a glass substrate that had been grafted with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). The micro-spots that contained plasmid and extra-cellular matrix (ECM) protein were separated from one another by a hydrophilic barrier generated by PEG. We successfully constructed the densest TCMs with spots of 50 μm in dia...

In order to eliminate the influence of the hysteresis, creep and nonlinear of the piezoelectric ceramic and other influence of the outside factors, the adaptive neural PSD control algorithm is proposed to implement the real-time control of the micro-positioning workpiece table. The experiment result verifies the validity of the close-loop control. The displacement precision is 0.01 μm, and resp...

Atomic Force Microscopes (AFM) are used for generating surface topography of samples at micro to atomic resolutions. Many commercial AFMs use piezoelectric tube nanopositioners for scanning. Scanning rates of these microscopes are hampered by the presence of low frequency resonant modes. When inadvertently excited, these modes lead to high amplitude mechanical vibrations causing the loss of acc...

Optoacoustic (OA) microscopy using an all-optical system based on the probe beam deflection technique (PBDT) for detection of laser-induced acoustic signals was investigated as an alternative to conventional piezoelectric transducers. PBDT provides a number of advantages for OA microscopy including (i) efficient coupling of laser excitation energy to the samples being imaged through the probing...

We demonstrate the piezoelectric effect on the responsivity of a metal-semiconductor-metal ZnO micro-/nanowire photodetector. The responsivity of the photodetector is respectively enhanced by 530%, 190%, 9%, and 15% upon 4.1 pW, 120.0 pW, 4.1 nW, and 180.4 nW UV light illumination onto the wire by introducing a -0.36% compressive strain in the wire, which effectively tuned the Schottky barrier ...