Now my research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology is working on piezoelectric power generation at the nanoscale. And at the nanoscale, things change. Gravity, which plays such a critical role in the larger world, is a very minor actor in the nanoworld as compared with the forces of chemical bonding and intermolecular attraction.

Where Gravity Doesn’t Matter
The force of gravity is not available to us on a useful scale in the nanoworld. If one attempted to construct a piezoelectric generator with a nanometer-scale beam, gravity would make almost no contribution to sustaining the beam’s motion, and the device would not work. Therefore, we need another method to build a nano-size generator for powering autonomous devices. Our team has been exploring innovative nano-technologies for converting mechanical energy (such as body movement and muscle stretching), vibration energy (such as acoustic and ultrasonic waves) and hydraulic energy (such as the flow of blood and other bodily fluids) into electric energy to power nanodevices.

My research focused on carbon nanotubes in the late 1990s. We invented a few techniques for measuring the mechanical, electrical and field-emission properties of individual carbon nano-tubes using in situ microscopy. But we could not control a nanotube’s electrical properties. I immediately realized that metal oxides are a new world—and why not explore those nanostruc-tures? In 2000 I started with nanobelts, white woollike products made by baking a metal oxide such as zinc in the presence of argon gas at 900 to 1,200 degrees Celsius, and with nanowires.

Our research has become focused on aligned zinc oxide nanowires, each of them a perfect six-sided, columnlike crystal that is grown on a solid conductive substrate using a standard vapor-liquid-solid process in a small tube furnace. We deposit gold nanoparticles, which serve as catalysts, on a sapphire substrate. An argon gas carrier flows through the furnace as a zinc oxide powder is heated. The nanowires then grow underneath the gold particles. The typical diameter of the nanowires is 30 to 100 nanometers, and they measure one to three microns in length.

The idea of converting mechanical energy into electricity came to my mind around August 2005, when we were measuring the electromechanical coupled properties of the wires. Using an atomic force microscope (AFM), we observed some voltage output peaks, but we were not sure what they were. We did systematic work through November of that year and learned that the voltage was from the piezoelectric effect of the zinc oxide; our results excluded the contribution from friction, contact or other confounding artifacts. The next step was determining what the process was for the charge output from a single nanowire. After studying a book on semiconductor devices, I proposed the working mechanism of what would become the nanogenerator.

Zinc oxide has the rare attribute of possessing both piezoelectric and semiconducting properties, which we put to use in creating and accumulating piezoelectric charges in the nanowires. We have shown that when the conductive tip of an AFM bends a straight, vertical nanowire, a strain field is established, with the stretched surface showing positive strain and the compressed surface showing negative strain. As the tip scans over the top of the zinc oxide nanowires, we observe many peaks in the corresponding voltage output image for each contact position. The piezoelectric effect creates an electric field inside the nanowire’s volume, with the stretched and compressed sides of the wire showing positive and negative voltages.

The idea came first, but we needed experimental support. Just before Christmas 2005, I designed an experiment to visualize directly the voltage output of a large wire under optical and AFM microscopy. My student and I did the experiments, and one evening in late December, we were rewarded with several videos that directly proved my model. The next day I worked with Jinhui Song in my office to edit the movie. Then we sent the paper to Science for publication.

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