Self‐Poled Sausage‐Like PVDF Nanowires Produced by Confined Phase Inversion as Novel Piezoelectric Nanogenerators
Hosna Soleymani, Mohammad Noormohammadi, M. Almasi Kashi, Morteza Hassanpour Amiri, Jasper J. Michels, Kamal Asadi, Mohammad Mahdi Abolhasani
Abstract
Abstract Piezoelectric poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) nanowires are of particular interest for energy harvesting as they are ultra‐sensitive to small vibrations. Here, a new, cost‐effective, and scalable approach to producing PVDF nanowires with strongly enhanced power output is presented. The method combines template‐wetting in cylindrical nano‐confinement with anisotropic solvent‐nonsolvent phase inversion to yield a fully novel nanowire morphology consisting of “sausage‐like” strings of nano‐domains. Dynamic numerical simulations of the phase inversion reveal the formation of these structures to be subject to a very rich and complex phenomenology. The simulated dependence of the feature size on the degree of confinement agrees with the experimentally observed trend. It is unambiguously demonstrated that the sausage‐like nano‐generators upsurge the power density to 280% compared to normal nanowires. Finite element modeling explains how the higher deformability of the sausage‐like nanostructures gives rise to this significant enhancement in piezoelectric performance.