Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 1 No. 4 | Page 16

16

High-performance
piezoelectric material
could make smart
sensors more sensitive

As gathering and transmitting detailed information
about the environment becomes an integrated
feature of mobile devices, cars, and homes, the
race is on among materials scientists to create more
sensitive materials for finely tuned sensors.

“The tiniest amount of stress you can detect determines how competitive you are with other sensing
technologies,” said Shashank Priya, the Robert E.
Hord Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the
College of Engineering and the associate director for
research and scholarship at the Institute for Critical
Technology and Applied Science.
In a study recently published in Nature Communications, Priya and research assistant professor Yongke
Yan report a new composition and synthesis technique for piezoelectric materials that, by controlling
the material’s microstructure, increases its sensitivity
by three to five times. The technique, developed
in collaboration with researchers at Michigan Tech,
could enable high-performance sensors for a wide
range of applications.
Piezoelectric materials can make ideal sensors
because they turn mechanical input, such as sound
or pressure changes, into electricity.
“In a smart home, automotive, or industrial
environment, for example, you want to measure
everything: temperature, pressure, strain, fluid flow,
acceleration, wind flow, light. All this can be done by
piezoelectric devices,” Priya said.
These sensors don’t need electricity to run, and can

Story-Eleanor Nelsen
In