Zinc oxide (ZnO)-based piezoelectric energy havesting device (PEHDs) have been intensively investigated due to its abundance, biocompatibility, mechanical robustness, and low permittivity. Up to date, consistent efforts to realize high performance ZnO NGs have been made. Various methods, such as surface passivation, p-n junction formation, and triboelectric layer insertion, have been tried to this end. However, high performance ZnO PENGs with mechanical durability have not been much reported due to ZnO’s inherently low piezoelectric coefficient and difficulties in forming polymer-piezoelectric ceramic composite structure PEHDs. In this work, we present a novel method to realize PEHDs with ZnO-polymer composite structure and extend the performance limit of intrinsic ZnO-based PEHDs. Specifically, ZnO nanosheets were chemically doped with vanadium during hydrothermal growth process, resulting in ferroelectrically phase transformed ZnO NSs. Thus, electric polarization domain in ZnO NSs can be aligned even in the composite structure by applying external electric field. The fabricated PEHDs (4 cm × 4 cm) demonstrated enhanced output power with excelling device reliability, exhibiting output voltage and current of ~32 V and ~6.2 mA, respectively. The peak output power of the PEHD is two orders of magnitude higher than that of PEHDs fabricated with intrinsic ZnO NWs. In addition, the PENG ensured the superior durability and reproducibility over a month without performance degradation, thanks to NSs encapsulation inside PDMS. The approach introduced here is simple, effective, and suitable for large-scale robust flexible high performance ZnO-based PENGs.

Vanadium-doped zinc oxide nanosheets-polymer composite for piezoelectric energy harvesting

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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