Electrosciences’ Director Markys Cain worked with the European team involved in the development of nanowire energy harvesting technologies. Their most recent publication, ‘Area-Selective Growth of Zinc Oxide Nanowire Arrays for Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting’ is available online. Electrosciences’ contributions included the use of their most recent addition to the ESPY family range of measurement instruments – ESPY33 – in measuring the piezoelectric performance of ZnO and GaN nanowire composite energy harvesting devices.

Our tool measured the macroscopic d33 coefficients of the devices made by the team. This data provides confidence that composite devices made from millions of nanoscale piezoelectric wires or fibres result in useable and useful force/charge and electric field/strain responses. For much more information take a look at the paper and also the EU EMPIR project’s website.

This project has received funding from the EMPIR program co-financed by the participating states and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under No. 19ENG05 Nanowires.