Scaling rules of piezoelectric nanowires in view of sensor and energy harvester integration

This paper presents for the first time the scaling rules of piezoelectric nanowires (NWs), as the active transducer element for sensors and mechanical energy harvesters. Moreover, to keep close to realistic structures, non-linear effects associated to large displacements were taken into account, as well as the influence of NW variability, based on experimental data. We demonstrate that well-above-state-of-the-art sensitivities and resolutions can be achieved for sensing applications, and that large energy conversion efficiencies can be obtained for mechanical energy harvesters (about 7 times larger than that of their bulk counterpart).