Research Projects

Actuate Lab Primary Research

Billions of piezoelectric sensors are produced every year, improving the efficiency of many current and emerging technologies. By interconverting electrical and mechanical energy they enable medical device, infrastructure, automotive and aerospace industries, but with a huge environmental cost. The majority of piezoelectric sensors contain Lead Zirconium Titanate (PZT), the fabrication of which requires toxic lead oxide. Prominent lead-free alternatives are heavily processed, and rely on expensive, non-renewable materials such as Niobium.

Pb-FREE will take on the ground-breaking challenge of developing biomolecular crystals as organic, low-cost, high-performance sensors, to out-perform and phase-out inorganic device components with dramatically reduced environmental impact. The project will rapidly accelerate the design, growth, and engineering of these novel piezoelectric materials under three pillars:

. An ambitious computational workflow will enable the design of super-piezoelectric crystalline assemblies by combining high-throughput quantum mechanical calculations with machine learning algorithms.

· A new method of growing polycrystalline biomolecules will be developed, allowing for easy, efficient creation of macroscopic piezoelectric structures.

· A state-of-the-art electromechanical testing suite will be established to characterise fully insulated and contacted biomolecular device components.

This project focuses on the systematic development of structural health monitoring devices for large infrastructure network through flexible amino acid based sensors. This includes optimisation of growth conditions, nucleation pathways, insulation, electroding, and FEA modelling. The project is co-supervised by Professor Kevin Ryan in the University of Limerick and carried out with collaborator Professor Vikram Pakrashi and his team in University College Dublin.

As regards biomolecular-based sensing, Ireland is in a key position to become a global leader in the manufacture of this emerging technology. Actuate Lab has recently validated these sensors at TRL 5 for structural health monitoring of infrastructure, and has a patent on amino acid piezoelectrics. SSPC researchers will be invaluable in the consultation and development of batch processing procedures for these organic crystals, many of which are currently produced in Ireland as active pharmaceutical ingredients. The citizen science procedure directly involves the Irish public in establishing these materials as reliable, high-performance, eco-friendly device components. As such, the impact and benefits include education and public engagement, creation of Irish jobs and industries, and fulfilling Ireland’s commitments to EU environmental regulations. By developing the fundamental insights necessary to create a new class of eco-friendly piezoelectric materials to replace inorganics in solid state devices, the results of this project will be directly relevant to the goals of the European Green Deal, which include the European economy investing in environmentally-friendly technologies. The goal is to help position Ireland as leaders in the realisation of eco-friendly, self-powered sensor technology. The low-cost, sustainable, low-energy-consumption fabrication process proposed in this project is also in line with the goals of the European Commission’s Sustainable Process Industry PPP (SPIRE), which aims to reduce energy consumption by 30% and raw materials by 20% in industry processes by 2030.

This project focuses on the development of a standardised growth process for a polycrystalline biomolecular device component. The resulting piezoelectric component structure is being optimised by researchers in the Univeristy of Limerick so that for a given solution concentration and volume, left to evaporate for a fixed amount of time, a standard piezoelectric response is measured. Polycrystalline films will be grown in a variety of shapes and thicknesses via a novel layered evaporation technique. The final “recipe” for an amino acid piezoelectric sensor will then be developed into a citizen science toolkit for the fabrication of thousands of these components across the country using non-toxic glycine, salt, and water. These components will be screened for their primary piezoelectric constant in the University of Limerick to determine the maximum variability and ease-of-processing of these crystalline materials.