Synergistically enhanced piezoelectric output in highly aligned 1D polymer nanofibers integrated all-fiber nanogenerator for wearable nano-tactile sensor

By Sujoy Ghosh, Dipankar Mandal. Nano Energy, 2018

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Lightweight tactile sensor with multimodal capabilities such as, wearability, self-powered operation, and mechanical robustness are of paramount importance in emerging portable electronics that involves human–machine integration. In this effort, an all-fiber wearable nanogenerator (NG) is designed, where, platinum (Pt) nano-particles (NPs) interfaced highly aligned 1D poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) nano-fibers arrays (Pt-PVDF NFs) is sandwiched between flexible conducting fabrics, consisting of interlocking micro-fibers arrays. In-situ ternary synergistic enhancement of piezoelectricity in nano-dimensionally confined 1D Pt-PVDF NFs arises from extensional force exertion on electrified solution jets, mechanical stretching on rapid collection and Pt-NPs interfacing with macromolecular PVDF chain. As a consequence, mechanically robust structure of Pt-PVDF NFs possess 5 times enhanced piezoelectric figure of merit ( FoM p ≈ 5 × 10 − 11 Pa − 1 ) in comparison to pure PVDF nano-fibers ( FoM p ≈ 9.7 × 10 − 12 Pa − 1 ). In addition, owing to the geometrical stress confinement effect, the Pt-PVDF NFs based piezoelectric nanogenerator (PtPENG) is proven to be a high-performance (output voltage, Voc~ 30 V and current, Isc~ 6 mA cm−2) and durable (~ 90,000 cycles) power generating device (output power, 22 µW cm−2) for small power consumer electronics. Importantly, PtPENG is demonstrated as a static strain-sensitive wearable tactile sensor that paves the way to improve human personalized healthcare monitoring system.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c86e45b158cfc822e11a75389b7e9925b9f314a0