On the piezoelectricity of collagen/natural rubber blend films

We studied the physicochemical, piezoelectric and dielectric properties of collagen–natural rubber (NR) films. The piezoelectric strain tensor element d14, and the dielectric permittivity ε11 were obtained for the collagen–NR blends. Resonance measurement of the piezoelectric strain constant d14 of collagen gives 0.057 pC/N. It was observed that for the addition of 10% of NR we have a decrease of the piezoelectricity to 0.042 pC/N. Our results also show that the presence of NR contributes to the increase of the thermal stability of the collagen films. The denaturation temperatures of collagen increases with the presence of NR. For the blend with 25% of NR (S2––Col75bn25), one has the highest denaturation temperature (109.6 °C). We also believe that the presence of NR lead to the decrease of the organization of the microscopic structure of the films, which results in the decrease of the piezoelectricity.