Advances in Piezoelectric Sensors

Dear Colleagues,

Piezoelectric sensors play a key role in many domains of industrial, medical, consumer and research sensing applications, including industrial non-destructive testing, preventive maintenance, structural health monitoring, vibration and shock monitoring, flow sensing, medical ultrasound, audible-frequency consumer acoustic microphones, underwater hydrophones, etc. This interdisciplinary topic covers the latest advances in piezoelectric sensors including, but not limited to, the following areas:

- Novel piezoelectric materials. Bulk and thin-film piezoelectric material deposition method. Material property modelling and novel experimental piezoelectric response characterization methods. Non-toxic and biocompatible materials and flexible piezoelectric materials. Optimization of piezoelectric coefficient, electromechanical coupling and polarization direction. High temperature operation.

- Advances in piezoelectric transducer design. Bulk-piezoelectric transducers and arrays. Contact transducers for and ultrasonic acoustic emission (AE) testing. Hydrophone designs. Air-coupled piezoelectric devices. Piezoelectric microelectromechanical (MEMS) devices. Resonant piezoelectric MEMS sensors. Thin-film bulk acoustic resonators. Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUT) and ultrasonic MEMS arrays. Surface-acoustic wave (SAW) devices. Gravimetric piezoelectric resonant MEMS sensors. Novel audible acoustic-frequency piezoelectric MEMS microphone designs. Piezoelectric MEMS voice-activity detectors. Bandwidth and sensitivity enhancement. Analytical and numerical finite element modelling, experimental prototypes and device response characterization.

- Electronic sensor interfaces for piezoelectric sensors. Charge amplifiers and charge conditioning circuits for readout of high-impedance or high-frequency piezoelectric devices. Ultra-low power acoustic or ultrasonic event detection and wake-up circuits. Self-powered piezo-electric sensor devices and conditioning circuits for harnessing the charge generated by the piezoelectric sensors.

- Embedded networked electronic systems for piezoelectric sensing. Autonomous, field-deployable systems for real-time acquisition, near-sensor processing, logging, and communication of piezoelectric signals. Novel system architectures and components for low-power design. Ultrasound, photoacoustics, and acoustic emission sensors on chip. System-on-chip, system-in-package, and heterogenous integration of piezoelectric transducers and electronics. Functional characterization of prototype implementations. Implementation of signal processing and machine learning algorithms on resource-constrained embedded hardware.

- Emerging applications of piezoelectric sensors. Photoacoustic spectroscopy in gas sensing. Ultrasonic and photoacoustic imaging for biomedical diagnostics. Industrial NDT applications in preventive maintenance, cavitation, cracking, leakage detection, material delamination, corrosion monitoring etc. Novel application of acoustic emission sensors in biology, precision agriculture, forestry, biomedicine, etc. Laboratory experiments and field deployments. Propagation path modelling between ultrasonic signal source and piezoelectric transduvers, acoustic waveguides. Application of novel feature-extraction methods, and clustering or classification algorithms for event detection, source identification or localization. Combining physical modelling with machine learning methods.

Dr. Dinko Oletić
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2100 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• piezoelectric sensors
• MEMS
• PMUT
• FBAR
• materials
• modelling
• sensor interfaces
• low-power design
• embedded sensors
• signal processing
• acoustic event detection
• ultrasonic imaging
• photoacoustics
• NDT
• acoustic emisssion testing