14 DAY TRIAL // Professor Tahir Cagin, from the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, is one of the most renowned experts in nanotechnology and piezoelectricity in the world, having received multiple awards over the years, including the prestigious Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. His work now focuses on obtaining the perfect-sized piezoelectric device, to be used for harvesting energy emitted by devices such as cell phones and MP3 players.
The ultimate goal of his research is to construct an electrical apparatus capable of sustaining itself, so that no more rechargeable power sources, such as batteries and accumulators will be required for its operation. His studies are driven by the knowledge that, in the near future, these gadgets will perform even more complex tasks than they do now, so, implicitly, their power requirements will be a lot larger.
Cagin is currently trying to adapt piezoelectric materials to the "nano" scale, which is extremely small, seeing how a nanometer represents the distance covered by one billionth of a millimeter. Piezoelectric materials, such as crystals and certain ceramics, have the capacity to generate electrical potential when they are subjected to mechanical stress, such as stretching, bending, or twisting.
"When materials are brought down to the nanoscale dimension, their properties for some performance characteristics dramatically change. One such example is with piezoelectric materials. We have demonstrated that when you go to a particular length scale – between 20 and 23 nanometers – you actually improve the energy-harvesting capacity by 100 percent," said Cagin.
"We're studying basic laws of nature such as physics and we're trying to apply that in terms of developing better engineering materials, better performing engineering materials. We're looking at chemical constitutions and physical compositions. And then we're looking at how to manipulate these structures so that we can improve the performance of these materials," he added.