Polarizing piezo

  • Thread starter Deleted member 552872
  • Start date

Thread Starter

Deleted member 552872

Joined Dec 31, 1969
0
I'm creating a piezo transducer and need to polarize it. I will either buy or salvage a piezo part or make one out of, say, PZT or quartz powder.
But I'm not sure how much voltage to use to polarize ("pole") the material, and if there are 'gotchas' involved - does anyone have a recommendation?
 

Thread Starter

Deleted member 552872

Joined Dec 31, 1969
0
This is an E = mc^2 sort of transducer application. The piezo is to be a lamination of: conductor-piezo layer-conductor.
Rearranging we have m = E/c^2. We are increasing the mass 'm' by adding outside energy "E" then assessing any gravity effects.

As is known, increasing energy "E" over the ambient energy in the mass (the ambient electric/magnetic fields of the particles of the atom being the ambient energy) increases the mass. From F = G(Mm)/r^2 universal gravitation, we know that increasing 'm' increases the force of gravity. We also know that increasing mass increases gravity from everyday experience (ie. Moon gravity is 1.625m/s^2 acceleration; Earth gravity is much larger, 9.8m/s^2 acceleration; the big jump in Earth gravity is due to its much larger "passive" mass, ie. more layers of dust/rocks than the Moon, "passive" meaning no power applied). The idea is to take a mass and make it "punch above its weight" in terms of its gravity field by adding external power to it. Piezo is the easiest way to pull this off, because by first poling all the crystals to align, you end up with a coherent coupling of the microwave frequency oscillations of the crystals into the Vacuum. At very high frequency and high voltage, we're hoping to see some gravity effect.

Goal is to polarize the piezo, then oscillate at high voltage and microwave frequency. "E" increase in the piezo will be substantial from the passive non-powered state of the crystals. The Cavendish Gravity experiment from the year 1798 - this setup, a version of it, is to be the model for detection of the effect. So the external 'circuit' is just the microwave high voltage power supply
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Alec_t

Joined Sep 17, 2013
14,280
1 gm mass is equivalent to ~9 x 10^13 Joules of energy. So, if my maths is correct, to detect just 1 microgram force of gravitational effect you would have to increase the transducer energy by ~9 x 10^7 Joules per gm, i.e by nearly 10^9 Joules for a 10gm transducer. That seems totally impractical :(. Methinks the transducer would vaporise long before even a thousandth of that amount of energy could be pumped into it. Just 10^4 Joules would raise its temperature above the ~2000°C melting point of barium titanate.
 
Last edited:

Thread Starter

Deleted member 552872

Joined Dec 31, 1969
0
1 gm mass is equivalent to ~9 x 10^13 Joules of energy. So, if my maths is correct, to detect just 1 microgram force of gravitational effect you would have to increase the transducer energy by ~9 x 10^7 Joules per gm, i.e by nearly 10^9 Joules for a 10gm transducer. That seems totally impractical :(. Methinks the transducer would vaporise long before even a thousandth of that amount of energy could be pumped into it. Just 10^4 Joules would raise its temperature above the ~2000°C melting point of barium titanate.
First, we're not seeking a huge effect - the Cavendish gravity experiment's method of detecting an effect is what we're after. Tiny effect. Also, the conversion of mass TO energy, or the conversion of energy TO mass, is not exactly what we'll be doing. We will be 'hot rodding' an existing bit of mass.

EXAMPLE: The scrap yard magnet at the bottom (see "Rectangular Scrap Magnets (DAWXRM)" here: http://ohiomagnetics.com/our-products/magnet-scrap-handling
with a 230 volts DC supply is an electromagnet that, with an energy added of 230vdc at probably 20 amps or less -- gives an effect of being able to lift 26,135 lbs. ... This huge force is easy to detect, and it is provided by the addition of the 230vdc (probably at 20 amps I reckon, or less, due to magnet heating) and is altering, temporarily, the electron spins in the electromagnet coils to produce a temporary magnetic field.

We thought along these lines for the piezo effect and a check for a change in gravity. The Cavendish experiment succeeded with zero added power to the metal used in that experiment some 222 years ago. We are hoping, by relying on a similarly sensitive detection method, to see an effect. Instead of aligning electron spins, we'll be aligning the piezo crystal axes then oscillating them at a very high frequency.
 

OBW0549

Joined Mar 2, 2015
3,566
I'm creating a piezo transducer and need to polarize it. I will either buy or salvage a piezo part or make one out of, say, PZT or quartz powder. But I'm not sure how much voltage to use to polarize ("pole") the material, and if there are 'gotchas' involved - does anyone have a recommendation?
With a bit of poking around the WWW I came up with some documents (here and here) that discuss PZT poling; the field strengths involved seem to be several tens of kV/cm applied for a few minutes with the material held just below the Curie temperature.

That's all I could find.
 

Thread Starter

Deleted member 552872

Joined Dec 31, 1969
0
1 gm mass is equivalent to ~9 x 10^13 Joules of energy. So, if my maths is correct, to detect just 1 microgram force of gravitational effect you would have to increase the transducer energy by ~9 x 10^7 Joules per gm, i.e by nearly 10^9 Joules for a 10gm transducer. That seems totally impractical :(. Methinks the transducer would vaporise long before even a thousandth of that amount of energy could be pumped into it. Just 10^4 Joules would raise its temperature above the ~2000°C melting point of barium titanate.
The other line of thinking we had in coming up with this idea was the configuration issue. It does admittedly seem like a stretch, from the outside, 'increase the mass to increase gravity' but we did apply some reasoning to it first.

The magnetism issue was a big motivator. For example, a 1-ton block of raw copper (or a 10 million ton block of copper for that matter), if you apply the standard magnetic field of a copper coil calculation to it, which is:

F = IN where F = force, I = current, N = number of turns of the coil,

the 1-ton block of raw copper has zero magnetic force. So for all we knew (up until Faraday), there was no way to configure a metal such as copper to couple with the Vacuum, and force the Vacuum to create a field in the space around it.

But we learned that you can form the copper, add energy to it, and when the electron spins are aligned, the copper couples very strongly to the Vacuum and produces the F = IN magnetic force.

Since we all know m = E/c^2, and universal gravitation force F = GMm/r^2, we noted that neither equation takes into account the formation, the organization of the mass. In both cases, the "m" is considered to be bulk mass - no alignment of its internals, and so on. Like the bulk block of copper with no organization added to it, and no magnetic field.

So the line of reasoning was "maybe there is an analog of electron spins in piezo material crystal alignment."

Other motivators: nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and nuclear quadrupole resonance (NQR) are measurable effects that only manifest on alignment of the internals of the material. With NMR, it's the alignment of the unpaired proton or neutron in the nucleus across the atoms in a sample. In NQR, it's the alignment of all the nuclear quadrupole moments across the atoms of the sample.

A physical picture might be, one person in a football stadium is doing 'The Wave.' And it's not detectable. But if everyone in the stadium is coherently doing The Wave, it is detectable, it is noticeable in a big way. Same with a block of bulk raw copper versus a formed coil with electric current running through it.

So - we did have some reasoning about this idea. The alignment and oscillation of the Piezo crystals struck us as an 'interior ordering' that is not captured in m = E/c^2 nor F = GMm/r^2. Maybe, as with applying an ordering and power to bulk copper, there is something unexpected with doing the same with the right type of material - piezo was the natural choice.

If the world did not know about electromagnetic coils, and the F = NI coil magnetic strength formula, and was unaware of how to shape bulk copper into a coil then apply power, but only relied on the bulk mass's properties, we would not be aware of its ability to couple with the Vacuum to force the Vacuum to create a magnetic field.

We still think what we're trying is a longshot. There's nothing we've found indicating that aligned/oscillating piezo crystals will have a gravity effect, but it would be cool to find out that it does.
 
Top