Powering a lightbulb using compression
A.K.A piezoelectricity | Piezoelectricity project #1
Imagine if all the light bulbs in the world were powered by pressing your finger on a metal plate. This is one of the numerous applications of piezoelectricity. What is piezoelectricity you ask? It is a form of generating electricity using mechanical stress; which is fancy for compression or pressure (I’ll explain exactly how it works later in the article).
In this article, I will demo my piezoelectric lightbulb and explain how it works.
Demonstration
The actual demo will be shown in a video later in the article.
Explanation
To find out how this works, lets break down the piezoelectric disk into parts:
If we were to look back at the image, we can see 3 different colours. A gold metal plate, a covered brown-ish gold piezoelectric material, and a second, white metal plate. Plus 2 wires of course. Now what makes a material piezoelectric is it’s molecular structure. Lets take an example of the molecular structure of the piezoelectric material,
As we can see, this picture is the molecular structure of the piezoelectric material quartz. On the left is the molecular structure when no external force is applied. Now on the right is when it is compressed. As you can see, negative charges collect at the bottom, and positive at the top. Now the reason quartz is piezoelectric is because of a lack of symmetry with its molecular structure. If u were to draw a straight line from any atom to the atom opposite it. You will see that it is another type of atom.
If you want to learn more on how piezoelectricity works, check out this article I wrote.
So now to go back to the piezoelectric lightbulb, when I press down on the disk, I am pressing down on the piezoelectric materials in the middle causing a current to flow through the conductors (metal plates) and into the wires. Then to the lightbulb.
