Tunable In Situ 3D-Printed PVDF-TrFE Piezoelectric Arrays.

Syed N Qadri,James Wissman,Gregory Yesner,Kaushik Sampath,Alec Ikei

doi:10.3390/s21155032

Syed N Qadri, James Wissman + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/s21155032

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Abstract

In the functional 3D-printing field, poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-trifluoroethylene) (PVDF-TrFE) has been shown to be a more promising choice of material over polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), due to its ability to be poled to a high level of piezoelectric performance without a large mechanical strain ratio. In this work, a novel presentation of in situ 3D printing and poling of PVDF-TrFE is shown with a d performance of up to 18 pC N, more than an order of magnitude larger than previously reported in situ poled polymer piezoelectrics. This finding paves the way forward for pressure sensors with much higher sensitivity and accuracy. In addition, the ability of in situ pole sensors to demonstrate different performance levels is shown in a fully 3D-printed five-element sensor array, accelerating and increasing the design space for complex sensing arrays. The in situ poled sample performance was compared to the performance of samples prepared through an ex situ corona poling process.

Highlights

Three-dimensional printing of sensors has become increasingly popular as it combines the benefits of additive manufacturing such as rapid prototyping, increased customization, and reduced waste along with the ability to embed sensors directly into a system without additional assembly [1]
An existing example is the fabrication of a piezoelectric microphone using digital light processing (DLP) and a resin loaded with barium titanate [7]
The polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF)-TrFE filament used in this study was procured from PolyK Technologies produced with a lab-scale 3D filament extruder

Summary

Introduction

Three-dimensional printing of sensors has become increasingly popular as it combines the benefits of additive manufacturing such as rapid prototyping, increased customization, and reduced waste along with the ability to embed sensors directly into a system without additional assembly [1]. This has been successfully demonstrated for various sensing mechanisms ranging from electrochemical detection to resistive strain measurement [2,3,4,5]. For 3D-printed piezoelectric sensor fabrication, ceramic piezoelectrics such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) have been favored due to their unmatched piezoelectric coefficient, d33 = 400 pC N−1 [8].

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