Pyroelectric Energy Conversion – 101
Editor’s note: This website should serve as an accessible entry point to pyroelectric energy conversion, somewhere between Wikipedia and a peer-reviewed academic paper. I include published data, which will be appropriately referenced, and unpublished work which may have been part of a failed experiment that can’t/won’t be published elsewhere. There are some great overviews of pyroelectrics, including this one, this one, and this one (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2062916). The purpose of this website is to fill in the holes that my team and I fell into while trying to design pyroelectric energy conversion devices. The main sections are as follows:
A Brief History of Pyroelectrics
The history of pyroelectrics is beautifully presented in the second chapter of the Sourcebook of Pyroelectricity by Prof. Lang of Ben-Gurion University. Some of the more interesting points bear repeating… First, is that Theophrastus, student of Plato and Aristotle, and the father of Botany, is the first to describe pyroelectricity in 315 B.C.E. His observation that lyncurium, a stone later attributed to male Lynx urine by Pliny the Elder, attracted straw and bits of wood when heated. The entomology of lyncurium may be better attributed to Lanka where tourmaline, a known pyroelectric, is abundant. Pyroelectricity was first described in a scientific journal in 1717 by Louis Lemery, who critically noted that the Ceylonese stone was “tasteless” – using all of his powers of observation. The famous Sir Charles Linnaeus was the first to connect the properties to an electric phenomena, which we now take for granted. Joseph Priestly and Ben Franklin exchanged ideas about pyroelectric tourmaline and much latter in 1878 Lord Kelvin described the crystal as containing “electrical doublets”. It is even speculated that Jacques and Pierre Curies discovery of piezoelectricity was built upon observations on non-uniform heating in pyroelectrics.
...more coming soon...
Editor’s note: This website should serve as an accessible entry point to pyroelectric energy conversion, somewhere between Wikipedia and a peer-reviewed academic paper. I include published data, which will be appropriately referenced, and unpublished work which may have been part of a failed experiment that can’t/won’t be published elsewhere. There are some great overviews of pyroelectrics, including this one, this one, and this one (https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.2062916). The purpose of this website is to fill in the holes that my team and I fell into while trying to design pyroelectric energy conversion devices. The main sections are as follows:
- The pyroelectric coefficient
- Energy conversion cycles
- Practical pyroelectric devices
A Brief History of Pyroelectrics
The history of pyroelectrics is beautifully presented in the second chapter of the Sourcebook of Pyroelectricity by Prof. Lang of Ben-Gurion University. Some of the more interesting points bear repeating… First, is that Theophrastus, student of Plato and Aristotle, and the father of Botany, is the first to describe pyroelectricity in 315 B.C.E. His observation that lyncurium, a stone later attributed to male Lynx urine by Pliny the Elder, attracted straw and bits of wood when heated. The entomology of lyncurium may be better attributed to Lanka where tourmaline, a known pyroelectric, is abundant. Pyroelectricity was first described in a scientific journal in 1717 by Louis Lemery, who critically noted that the Ceylonese stone was “tasteless” – using all of his powers of observation. The famous Sir Charles Linnaeus was the first to connect the properties to an electric phenomena, which we now take for granted. Joseph Priestly and Ben Franklin exchanged ideas about pyroelectric tourmaline and much latter in 1878 Lord Kelvin described the crystal as containing “electrical doublets”. It is even speculated that Jacques and Pierre Curies discovery of piezoelectricity was built upon observations on non-uniform heating in pyroelectrics.
...more coming soon...