Flexible Fibrous Piezoelectric Sensors on Printed Silver Electrodes

Here, we report a facile fabrication of flexible piezoelectric sensors based on highly aligned poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) nanofibers and printed silver electrodes without any additional poling processes. One-dimensional (1-D) piezoelectric PVDF nanofibers are directly produced onto stamped and sprayed interdigitated electrodes by electrospinning. We studied here the effect of contact area between nanofibers and electrodes by controlling the surface roughness of electrode. PVDF sensors show increased piezoelectric responses with larger actual contact area of the interdigitated electrodes. The measured output voltage under periodic bending stress is up to about 1 V. It is expected that this facile method to fabricate the PVDF sensors can be used to integrate the energy harvesters into flexible and stretchable functional electronic devices.