Miniaturized accelerometers are necessary for evaluating the performance of small devices, such as haptics, robotics and simulators. In this study, we fabricated miniaturized accelerometers using well-aligned ZnO nanowires. The layer of ZnO nanowires is used for active piezoelectric layer of the accelerometer, and copper was chosen as a head mass. Seedless and refresh hydrothermal synthesis met...

Despite rapid advances in the design and fabrication of miniaturized sensors and devices, their practical applications have been impeded by the lack of suitably miniscule sources of electrical power. Indeed, the generation and storage of electrical energy for mobile devices and systems is one of the most urgent challenges in science and engineering today. Microand nanoscale devices — such as ul...

Zinc oxide is a unique material that exhibits exceptional semiconducting, piezoelectric, and pyroelectric properties. Nanostructures of ZnO are equally as important as carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires for nanotechnology and have great potential applications in nanoelectronics, optoelectronics, sensors, field emission, light-emitting diodes, photocatalysis, nanogenerators, and nanopiezotro...

ABSTRACT Perovskite alkaline niobate (XNbO3) nanowires are attracting lots of attention having a variety of interesting properties such as significant nonlinear optical response, pronounced birefringence, considerable piezoelectric, pyroelectric, photorefractive, and photocatalytic response, as well as superior mechanical and chemical stability. Their ability to efficiently generate second harm...

One-dimensional (1D) ferroelectric nanostructures, such as nanowires, nanorods, nanotubes, nanobelts, and nanofibers, have been studied with increasing intensity in recent years. Because of their excellent ferroelectric, ferroelastic, pyroelectric, piezoelectric, inverse piezoelectric, ferroelectric-photovoltaic (FE-PV), and other unique physical properties, 1D ferroelectric nanostructures have...

Here, a new method is demonstrated that uses sideways pulsed laser deposition to deliberately bend nanowires into a desired shape after growth and fabricate arc-shaped composite nanowire arrays of a wide range of nanomaterials. The starting nanowires can be ZnO, but the materials to be deposited can be metallic, semiconductor, or ceramic depending on the application. This method provides a gene...

Wide bandgap semiconductor ZnO, GaN and InN nanowires have displayed the ability to detect many types of gases and biological and chemical species of interest. In this review, we give some recent examples of using these nanowires for applications in pH sensing, glucose detection and hydrogen detection at ppm levels. The wide bandgap materials offer advantages in terms of se...

Piezoelectric nanocomposites represent a unique class of materials that synergize the advantageous features of polymers and piezoelectric nanostructures and have attracted extensive attention for the applications of energy harvesting and self-powered sensing recently. Currently, most of the piezoelectric nanocomposites were synthesized using piezoelectric nanostructures with relatively low piez...

A self-powered gas sensor that can actively detect ethanol at room temperature has been realized from a Pt/ZnO nanoarray nanogenerator. Pt nanoparticles are uniformly distributed on the whole surface of ZnO nanowires. The piezoelectric output of Pt/ZnO nanoarrays can act not only as a power source, but also as a response signal to ethanol at room temperature. Upon exposure to dry air and 1500 p...

We report the piezoelectric properties of ZnO nanowires (NWs) obtained by using a nanoindenter with a conductive boron-doped diamond tip. The direct piezoelectric effect was measured by performing nanoindentations under load control, and the generated piezoelectric voltage was characterized as a function of the applied loads in the range 0.2-6 mN. The converse piezoelectric effect was measured ...