Electric Poling-assisted Additive Manufacturing Process for Lead-free Piezoelectric Device Fabrication

This paper presents a new additive manufacturing method based on electric poling process often used in many polymeric materials processing for lead-free piezoelectric device fabrication. This is to directly and continuously print piezoelectric devices from Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymeric filament rods under a strong electric field and mechanical stretching along the filament core. Piezoelectric devices were fabricated and its crystalline phase transition was measured by using the Fourier transform infrared spectroscope. The results demonstrate that increasing the electric field increases the piezoelectric crystalline phase transitions and results in a device with higher current output under stress. This technique can be used to fabricate fully 3D freeform structured piezoelectric devices for sensing, actuator and energy harvesting applications with a simple, low cost, integrated processing and fabrication step.