A Preliminary Investigation of Converse Piezoelectric Effect in Bird Feathers

Abstract

Piezoelectricity is a relatively common phenomenon exhibited by a large number of crystalline structures. Piezoelectric effects have been investigated in a number of hard and soft tissues and so far appear to be a fundamental property of living tissues whose importance has been overlooked for a long time. Piezoelectricity accounts in principle for a number of biological phenomena that play an important role in some physiological mechanisms. The present work describes the investigation of the converse piezoelectric effect in bird feathers for a number of feather configurations in the frequency range 1 to 20 Kc/sec using a phonograph pick-up. The converse piezoelectric effect in bird feathers is attributed to the protein keratin constituents of the feather structure. The influence of several parameters such as detection position, temperature, humidity, etc. have been investigated experimentally.