Modeling of Piezoelectric Nanodevices

Since fabrication, characterization, and integration into practical devices of nanostructures is unavoidably complex and expensive, accurate models are crucial for designing high performance nanostructures-based devices. Moreover, piezoelectric nanotransducers may have several crucial advantages when compared with the correspondent macro- or micro-devices. For these reasons, after reviewing both piezoelectric constitutive equations and equivalent circuits for piezoelectric transducers, we show how these tools can be applied to analysis and design of practical piezoelectric nanodevices. As an important example, we choose piezoelectric nanogenerators; however, by analyzing this type of devices, we discuss the key general concepts and challenges for modeling piezoelectric nanodevices.