Fundamentals of piezoelectricity

Abstract

The topic of the following chapter is relatively difficult and includes different areas of knowledge. The piezoelectric phenomenon is a complex one and covers concepts of electronics as well as most of the areas of classical physics such as: mechanics, elasticity and strength of materials, thermodynamics, acoustics, waves propagation, optics, electrostatics, fluids dynamics, circuit theory, crystallography etc. Probably, only a few disciplines of engineering and science need to be so familiar to so many fields of physics. Current bibliography on this subject is vast though dispersed in research publications, and few of the books on this topic are usually compilations of the authors research works. Therefore, they are not thought for didactic purposes and are difficult to understand, even for postgraduates. The objective of this chapter is to help understand the studies and research on piezoelectric sensors and transducers, and their applications. Considering the multidisciplinary nature, this tutorials readers can belong to very different disciplines. They can even lack the necessary basic knowledge to understand the concepts of this chapter. This is why the chapter starts providing an overview of the piezoelectric phenomenon, doing consciously initial simplifications, so that the main concepts, which will be progressively introduced, prevail over the accessories. The issues covered in this chapter must be understood without the help of additional texts, which are typically included as references and are necessary to study in depth specific topics. Finally, the quartz crystal is introduced as a micro-gravimetric sensor to present the reader an application of the piezoelectric phenomenon, which will be dealt with along the following chapters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008.