Surpizing results from Piezoelectric coin speaker.

Have you ever made a wine glass or crystal sing by wetting your finger? Would you believe that when you hit the resonant frequency of a tuning fork, wine glass, or even a plain old drinking glass that is made of glass, a very small signal, not even audiable, at the resonant frequency of the glass can be very loud. But, there is a trick too it. Either the very center of the piezoelectric coin speaker has to be in contact with the rim of the glass, or the very outer most edge. When you pull the speaker away, it is quite. But, when that thing has contact, it is ear piercing.

It almost makes me think that if piezoelectric elements were used, and formed into bells, that you could use the mechanical resonant frequency of the object, using mathcad, or some other form of simulation software find the standing wave in the shaped piezoelectric ceramic, and use it's resonant frequency to generate more power than you were using.

Reply to
The Flavored Coffee Guy
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Of course it does NOT generate more power than you are using. What it does is concentrate the available energy into a single frequency and emit the energy with much greater effiiciency because of the large area of the glass vs. the piezo element alone.

Reply to
Bob Eld

Of course you'll never get more energy than you put in (unless you set the thing on fire), but the same principle is used in those piezo beepers that are so loud - the cavity in the plastic housing resonates with the active element.

-- Joe Legris

Reply to
J.A. Legris

When you are dealing with a mechanical resonant vibration, it's like applying 5lbs of force to a swing with some-one on it. Each time they return, the altitude is a little higher, and the energy of interia is summed up. The action of the pendulum, only looses energy as a product of wind resistance. A bell, however, is quite different. It's the combination of the elasticity of the metal, and the elasticity of air. That's why when you fill a glass with a uncompressable fluid like water, the crystal will ring at a higher frequency. If you filled with lanoline, the resonant frequency would drop because the speed of sound is so much slower in lanoline. It is concievable to move that all down an octive.

Now, if your material were piezoelectric, which of most is not really solid, nor hard, but if you had something that wasn't full of holes like a sponge, you could make a bell, and your first AC connection would be 90 degrees from the the piezoelectric transducer. The second would be + 45 degrees. A standing wave in a circular bell, produces a oval that is oscillating at 90 degrees from zero. But, with a piezoelectric material, you need a compression zone, and a decompression zone to produce power.

I have just done this experiment today, and it was too easy. I took the coin speaker from an old alarm clock, and used my signal generator, which has a peak to peak output of 2 volts, and the impedance of the output is 50 ohms. I couldn't turn up the power high enough to but barely hear that thing at it's own resonant frequency. But, finding the resonant frequency of a glass that was half full, made a very loud ear piercing resonant sound. You can talk, but you can't f*ck with the real world results.

I don't have the materials to research a machined bell made of peizoelectric ceramic, nor do I have access to that material. I have little tiny bits of the substance that is lodged in my cigarette lighter about the size of a flint. That tiny little object is probably resonant to frequency in the megahertz, if not nearly gigahertz. It is too small to evaluate such a set of conditions. The bell would have to be made of that piezoelectric material. Some materials make crappy tuning forks, and crappy bells. That could be true, but there are a range materials that fall into same catagory, that are not used in making these lighters. Without access, I can't say, and didn't say it was producing more power than it was using, I only held it in question, because the sound energy out is very obviously more than the sound energy in.

Reply to
The Flavored Coffee Guy

If you looked at the base of a brass tuning fork. If there were a seat for a piece of piezoelectric material from a lighter right at the base, and you could electrically isolate it ridgedly with glass on one end, to place a piece of wire, and have set screw making the whole tuning fork ground, then a measurement could be made in respect to the energy in vs energy out. But, you would have to have some pressure applied to the crystal constantly, and that pressure would have to vary with the mechanical oscillation of the tuning fork. The majority of the mass would be working for you, and right at the fulcrum of the event, your piece of piezoelectric material would be working. Your set screw and mounts would be right at the base of the fork where the metal started off into two directions.

Reply to
The Flavored Coffee Guy

Then you could use a step down transformer, determin phase, and finally see if the audio transformer didn't make the tuning fork continue to ring.

Reply to
The Flavored Coffee Guy

--- Yes, but the _power_ of the acoustic output will be less than the electrical power input to the system.

An experiment you can do which will be equivalent to what you're experiencing would be to connect an inductor and a capacitor in series and drive them at their resonant frequency from a voltage source. If you do, you'll find that the voltage at the junction of the L and the C is many times higher than the voltage driving the circuit.

However, if you measure the power going into the circuit from the generator and the power going into a load from the LC junction, you'll find that the power going into the load will be less than the power going into the circuit from the generator.

-- JF

Reply to
John Fields

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