3D printing piezoelectrics

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-04-flexible-piezoelectric-composite-d.html

One summer in Jerusalem a few years ago a friend, Ray Scudero, polymath genius type and I worked on piezo transducers to use as musical instrument pickups.

That was fun making those pickups from the round transducers.
Now there seems to be a way to do the same with a 3D printer so that would lend the possibility of making music pickups with predetermined shapes so they could say, go around a flute, so that would require a tube shape or a curve specific for a guitar or mandolin and so forth.
Sounds like a fun project.

@sonhouse said
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-04-flexible-piezoelectric-composite-d.html

One summer in Jerusalem a few years ago a friend, Ray Scudero, polymath genius type and I worked on piezo transducers to use as musical instrument pickups.

That was fun making those pickups from the round transducers.
Now there seems to be a way to do the same with a 3D printer so that would l ...[text shortened]... a tube shape or a curve specific for a guitar or mandolin and so forth.
Sounds like a fun project.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211285520302949
is the link to the orignal article.

A very cool idea and they really manage to make a good coupling in the mixture of the ceramics into the polymer. The interesting Quote is:

It was found that the 3D-printing, non-stereolithographic grid-composite exhibits a greater flexible character after doping ceramic particles and also excellent electromechanical coupling with a piezoelectric voltage coefficient g33 as high as 400 × 10−3 m V N−1, which is one order of magnitude higher than that of PZT based ceramics. Under drop hammer (~20 N) impact, it can instantly drive over 20 commercial red-LEDs lighting directly without using a charge storage capacitor.

@Ponderable
Which means in a musical instrument pickup, larger signals, lower noise. The only caveat is what is the frequency response? If it was responsive to 1 hz to 100 hz it would not be very good for instrument pickups.

The surprise for us when we did the experiments was how clean they sounded even though we had taken the quarter sized thin transducers and cut them into 1/8 inch wide units the response was audibly better than mics.

@Ponderable

Another possibility for a 3D piezo spring is the idea of making a simple seismograph.

Suppose you have 6 such springs and a mass, say 100 grams cube of metal, whatever the springs can hold, one on each face and the springs going to the inside of an outer shell, say another cube big enough to contain the springs and the inner cube, then just put the whole thing underground with 7 leads, one ground and the other 6 to the other end of each spring, then to a set of A/D converters then to a laptop via Bluetooth or WIFI, whatever, and just sit back and wait. All of the different kind of waves would give a signal to that device.
The idea would be the outer shell would vibrate but the inner shell would be shielded from the vibration to a certain extent and that would generate a 3D graphable set of voltage data that could make real seismic readings.
A co-worker where I work, his father built one in his basement 25 years ago and it works really well, for instance, the 6.8 just registered in Indonesia, was picked up on the instrument in Jim's basement in New Jersey.

@sonhouse said
@Ponderable

Another possibility for a 3D piezo spring is the idea of making a simple seismograph.

Suppose you have 6 such springs and a mass, say 100 grams cube of metal, whatever the springs can hold, one on each face and the springs going to the inside of an outer shell, say another cube big enough to contain the springs and the inner cube, then just put the whole th ...[text shortened]... e 6.8 just registered in Indonesia, was picked up on the instrument in Jim's basement in New Jersey.

This sounds like fun. Of course you would put the whole instalaltion on a corner of the cube to distribute the load?

@Ponderable
I was thinking the cube would be light enough to be supported in 3D by the springs alone, there would be stresses on the vertical springs for sure but when the physical positioning was determined, the horizontal springs could be installed on the inside of the larger cube with no stress on them therefore only the vertical springs would have a stress on them. I guess really only the upper vertical spring would have stress, so the other 5 would be stress free and able to freely generate the seismic signals.
In fact, it might be the top vertical spring wouldn't even have to be piezo, just a spring to hold the cube in place and then the bottom piezo spring with a bit of stretch on it would generate the up and down motions of an earthquake. But if the top spring was piezo and could support the mass of the inner cube, adding the two piezo signals together would double the vertical S/N ratio.