Design of a flexure composite with large flexoelectricity

Flexoelectric effect has attained considerable interests owing to its potential sensing and actuating application. However, even highly developed in the past few years, the present flexoelectricity of materials are still difficult to satisfy the standard for device applications. Designing new flexoelectric device has become a fundamental issue in this newly arising field. In this paper, we systematically designed a flexure composite consisting of barium strontium titanate (BST) ceramic bar and the supporting material based on a parametric sweep finite element method (FEM) simulation. Our simulation result suggested that the flexoelectric performance of this flexure composite would be highly dependent with the thickness/length ratio of BST sheet and the parameter of the supporting materials. With proper design, the optimized flexoelectricity of this structure is expected to be approximately 50 times larger than the previous flexure device which is comprised of BST bar and tungsten wire. Our result further suggested FEM method promising for the further exploration of the flexoelectric device.