Direct writing metal-freebio-organic piezoelectricenergyharvester

Abstract: The project is about piezoelectric energy harvesters and piezoelectric bio-organic materials.Nowadays, various kinds of energy harvesters based on micro or nano materials are appliedinmanyelectronic applications, such as wearable devices and electricity generators. Amongthem, thepiezoelectric effect-based energy harvesters are more attractive in research and industryfields. Inrecent years, piezoelectric biomaterials become a popular option because they are availabletocouple electrical and mechanical energy in a biological, ecofriendly systemto generate electricityinreal time. Among them, γ- glycine crystals have been recently synthesized in wafer scale throughasimple polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-assisted evaporation process exhibiting good piezoelectricperformance. However, so far there are no metal-free energy-harvesting devices basedonPVA-glycine film to enable green manufacturing. In this project, we proposed the direct inkwritingorganic PEDOT:PSS electrodes and PVA-glycine-PVA piezoelectric crystals to fabricate metal-freeenergy harvesters. The output voltage reaches 1.5 V at a load resistance of 500 MΩandunderaforce of 10 N. The performance is comparable to other glycine-based devices in recent literature.Our scalable, sustainable and low-cost printing process is expected to greatly contribute tothefieldof biomaterials-based piezoelectric energy harvesting.