Energy harvesting based on flexoelectricity

In this work, the idea of employing flexoelectricity for vibrational energy harvesting is introduced. Different from piezoelectricity, flexoelectricity is a universal electromechanical coupling which scales with the size of the system. At nanoscale, the effect of flexoelectricity may dominate the electromechanical behaviors of a piezoelectric material. Based on this idea, we examine in detail, the possibility of using the phenomenon of flexoelectricity for energy harvesting espacially at nanoscale. Our theoretical work shows that the conversion efficiency of a designed flexoelectric energy harvester increases drastically as the decrease of system size at submicron or nanoscale.