Poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) has long been regarded as an ideal piezoelectric plastic because it exhibits a large piezoelectric response and a high thermal stability. However, the realization of piezoelectric PVDF elements has proven to be problematic, amongst others, due to the lack of industrially-scalable methods to process PVDF into the appropriate polar crystalline forms. Here, we show that fully piezoelectric PVDF films can be produced via a single-step process that exploits the fact that PVDF can be molded at temperatures below its melting temperature, i.e. via solid-state-processing. We demonstrate that we thereby produce d_PVDF, the piezoelectric charge coefficient of which is comparable to that of biaxially stretched d_PVDF. We expect that the simplicity and scalability of solid-state processing combined with the excellent piezoelectric properties of our PVDF structures will provide new opportunities for this commodity polymer and will open a range of possibilities for future, large-scale, industrial production of plastic piezoelectric films
Cite
@article{arxiv.1706.08068,
title = {Solid-state-processing of d_PVDF},
author = {Jaime Martín and Dong Zhao and Thomas Lenz and Ilias Katsouras and Dago M. de Leeuw and Natalie Stingelin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.08068},
year = {2017}
}