Ricerc@Sapienza

The piezoelectric properties of PVDF mainly depend on its β-phase. In this work, we investigated through Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM) the piezoelectric properties of PVDF composite films when we induce the formation of β-phase crystals adding a nanofiller, like graphene nanoplatelets (GNPs) or zinc-oxide nanorods (ZnO-NRs), but without applying any electrical poling. At first, we fabricated piezoelectric PVDF nanocomposite films by the solution casting method.

The present work reports the development and the piezoelectric characterization of nano-engineered thin-films of Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) and vertical array of zinc oxide nanorods (ZnO-NRs). In particular, the piezoelectric response of the produced samples was investigated by evaluating the piezoelectric coefficient (d33), through Piezoresponse Force Microscopy (PFM). We compared the piezoelectric response of three different samples: a neat PVDF thin-film, an array of vertically oriented ZnO-NRs and an array of vertically oriented ZnO-NRs embedded in PVDF.