When playing with piezoelectric buzzers as potential microphones for my #Feedbass! project, I noticed they are very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Like, it would detect me waving a hand nearby.
At some point, I soldered a pair of LEDs to a buzzer, just to see how hard do I have to push it to make them light up. And checked the temperature sensitivity as well, and I was shocked! Heating or cooling the buzzer quickly enough makes an LED glow!
I totally wouldn't have been surprised by a little bit of pyroelectricity from essentially anything. But being strong enough to light up a LED is totally nuts!
I'm not sure if it is pure pyroelectricity. Almost certainly, piezoelectricity can be involved. Because ceramic and metal plate have different coefficients of expansion, hence heating the buzzer will cause it to behave like a bimetallic plate, and thus create mechanical stress and cause some piezoelectric voltage to appear.
Now I am wondering, what cool project can be done based on this effect. A thermal imager, maybe?
a bit of googling tells me that the piezoelectric material in the buzzer is likely PZT, Lead Zirconate Titanate,
This is very impressive I like this idea and would love to take its advantage I am also working on a same type of National Sons Day project you can see here.
It would be interesting to see if the metallic sheet of the buzzer is transparent to infra red. If yes, then a very cheap DIY thermal camera sensor might be achieved by scratching the metallic deposited layer into a square grid, in order to form independent thermal pixels. Then, attach the scratched square grid to a PCB using solder balls, like the ones for the BGA ICs, and here we have it, a DIY thermal camera sensor.
'Never' and 'always' are dangerous affirmations, they can be defeated by a single counterexample, like i.e. Germanium is a metal, yet is transparent to IR, so it is used to make Ge infra red lens.
The etching idea seems better than scratching, thought.
Anyway, a DIY IR thermal camera might be in reach using your observation. That is a project I will like to give it a try one day, I'll add it to the bucket list.
Germanium is a semiconductor with a band gap of 0.67 eV. They used to make transistors off this stuff.
A metal doesn't have to absorb visible light. It should then have a forbidden zone an eV or two above Fermi level. I'm not aware of any such metal though, and I wonder if such metal will absorb seriously anyway.
I was always thought about semiconductors as being metals. Now I understand that was incorrect. My bad, sorry for the wrong affirmations. Thank you for pointing that out.
This is very impressive I like this idea and would love to take its advantage I am also working on a same type of National Sons Day project you can see here.