Carbon nanotubes for high performance flexible piezoelectric polymer composite nanogenerators

Abstract

Recently, the demand for flexible and wearable nanogenerators (NGs) have been paid great of attention to convert mechanical energy such as human motion into electrical energy. NGs are known by their simple structure and excellent piezoelectric performance after polarization. However, the polarization is very long and unsafe. In order to avoid that, the proposed solution was to dope multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) for better distribution of piezoelectric nanoparticles. In this work, piezoelectric nanocomposite generators were prepared using solution mixing and mold casting. A comparative study was performed to investigate the impact of MWCNTs via morphological and mechanical testing. Both nanogenerators shows good performance due to high uniformity of nanoparticle distribution within the polymer matrix showing the efficiency of the adapted fabrication process. In addition, doping multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNTs) within the piezoelectric nanocomposite leads to increase the output voltage by about 20% comparing to the NG without carbon nanotube (CNTs) which corresponds to 6.6 V and a power of ~37.87 μW at a load resistance of about 660 kΩ due to the enhanced distribution of the nanoparticle and better electro-mechanical coupling.