A system for the characterization of piezoelectric bimorphs as sensors

The possibility of exploiting the dependence of the produced charge on the mechanical stress applied to the piezoelectric materials is very attractive, especially in the field of sensors. In this paper, a solution for the investigation of the sensing properties of a piezoelectric bimorph is discussed along with a characterization tool. An experimental setup, which adopts innovative solutions is presented. The architecture adopted was developed to study the above- mentioned material properties in a well-defined range of deformation and force applied to the device under test. A dedicated software interface was implemented to manage the characterization system and process the acquired data. A general-purpose data acquisition card and instruments usually available in research and educational laboratories were used, thus guaranteeing the low cost feature, easy reproducibility and flexibility.