Piezoelectricity

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July 14,
2009

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: August

21, 2018.

You've probably used piezoelectricity

(pronounced "pee-ay-zo-electricity") quite
a few times today. If you've got a quartz
watch, piezoelectricity is what helps it
keep regular time. If you've been writing a
letter or an essay on your computer with
the help of voice recognition software, the
microphone you spoke into probably used
piezoelectricity to turn the sound energy
in your voice into electrical signals your 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!

Photo: A piezoelectric actuator used by NASA for various kinds of testing. Photo by
courtesy of NASA Langley Research Center (NASA-LaRC).

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).
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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.

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

Here's a quick animation showing how piezoelectricity occurs. It's somewhat simplified,
but it gives you the basic idea:

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 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
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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.
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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

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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.

Who discovered piezoelectricity?

The piezoelectric effect was discovered in 1880 by two French physicists, brothers Pierre
and Paul-Jacques Curie, in crystals of quartz, tourmaline, and Rochelle salt (potassium
sodium tartrate). They took the name from the Greek work piezein, which means "to
press."

Practical demonstrations
A simple demonstration of piezoelectricity: Try piezoelectricity for yourself with a
bit of help from by Dr Jonathan Hare and The Creative Science Centre.
How to make a piezoelectric trumpet pickup: A fun Instructable uses piezoelectricity
to convert old-fashioned trumpet sound into something more interesting.

Articles
A Fitbit for the Stomach by Megan Scudellari. IEEE Spectrum, 11 October, 2017.
Researchers develop a piezoelectric stomach sensor.
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.
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!
Future Helicopters Get SMART: NASA, 25 February 2009. NASA scientists think
piezoelectric blades could make helicopters quieter and more economical.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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?

Patents
Inventors have been dreaming up all kinds of imaginative uses for piezoelectricity for
years. Here are a few examples from the US Patent and Trademark Office database:

US Patent: US 20140128753 A1: Piezoelectric heart rate sensing for wearable

devices or mobile devices by Michael Edward Smith Luna et al, 8 May 2014. A
cutting-edge sensor that can monitor your heart and send details to your cellphone
(or similar mobile device).
US Patent: 8,087,186: Piezoelectric-based toe-heaters for frostbite protection by
​Jahangir S. Rastegar, 3 January 2012. These shoes use piezoelectric materials to
convert the repeated squashing and stretching of your shoes into electrical energy
that can warm your feet.
US Patent: 20050127677: Roadway generating electrical power by incorporating
piezoelectric materials by Jeffrey Luttrull, 16 June 2005. Describes a method of
harvesting energy from roads. US Patent: 8,278,800: Multi-layer piezoelectric
generator by Haim Abramovich et al, Innowattech, 2 October 2010, is a variation on
the same basic idea with more details of how road generators would actually work.
US Patent: 4,685,296: Ocean wave energy conversion using piezoelectric material
members by Joseph R. Burns, 11 August 1987. In this invention, piezoelectric
materials generate electricity from the up-and-down movements of ocean waves.
US Patent: 5,598,196: Piezoelectric ink jet print head and method of making by
Hilarion Braun, Eastman Kodak, 28 January 1987. An inkjet print head that squirts
precise droplets of ink using piezoelectric materials.

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