3D printing flexible piezoelectric materials for energy harvesting and sensors
Piezoelectric materials come in only a few defined shapes and are made of crystal and ceramic that often require a clean room to manufacture. While ceramics can be 3D printed, the team led by Xiaoyu ‘Rayne’ Zheng, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, and a member of the Macromolecules Innovation Institute, developed a model that allows them to manipulate and design arbitrary piezoelectric constants, resulting in the material generating electric charge movement in response to incoming forces and vibrations from any direction, via a set of 3D printable topologies.
Unlike conventional piezoelectrics where electric charge movements are prescribed by the intrinsic crystals, the new method allows users to prescribe and program voltage responses to be magnified, reversed or suppressed in any direction.
“We have developed a design method and printing platform to freely design the sensitivity and operational modes of piezoelectric materials,” said Zheng. “By programming the 3D active topology, you can achieve pretty much any combination of piezoelectric coefficients within a material, and use them as transducers and sensors that are not only flexible and strong, but also respond to pressure, vibrations and impacts via electric signals that tell the location, magnitude and direction of the impacts within any location of these materials.”
His team produced a substitute material that mimics a piezoelectric crystal but allows for the lattice orientation to be altered by design. “We have synthesized a class of highly sensitive piezoelectric inks that can be sculpted into complex three-dimensional features with ultraviolet light. The inks contain highly concentrated piezoelectric nanocrystals bonded with UV-sensitive gels, which form a solution – a milky mixture like melted crystal – that we print with a high-resolution digital light 3D printer,” said Zheng.
The team demonstrated the 3D printed materials at a scale measuring fractions of the diameter of a human hair. “We can tailor the architecture to make them more flexible and use them, for instance, as energy harvesting devices, wrapping them around any arbitrary curvature,” he said. “We can make them thick, and light, stiff or energy-absorbing.”
The team has printed and demonstrated smart materials wrapped around curved surfaces, worn on hands and fingers to convert motion, and harvest the mechanical energy, but the applications go well beyond wearables and consumer electronics. Zheng sees the technology as a leap into robotics, energy harvesting, tactile sensing and intelligent infrastructure, where a structure is made entirely with piezoelectric material, sensing impacts, vibrations and motions, and allowing for those to be monitored and located. The team has printed a small smart bridge to demonstrate its applicability to sensing the locations of dropping impacts, as well as its magnitude, while robust enough to absorb the impact energy. The team also demonstrated their application of a smart transducer that converts underwater vibration signals to electric voltages.
The material has sensitivities 5-fold higher than flexible piezoelectric polymers. The stiffness and shape of the material can be tuned and produced as a thin sheet resembling a strip of gauze, or as a stiff block. “We have a team making them into wearable devices, like rings, insoles, and fitting them into a boxing glove where we will be able to record impact forces and monitor the health of the user,” said Zheng.
“Traditionally, if you wanted to monitor the internal strength of a structure, you would need to have a lot of individual sensors placed all over the structure, each with a number of leads and connectors,” said Huachen Cui, a doctoral student with Zheng and first author of the paper in Nature Materials. “Here, the structure itself is the sensor – it can monitor itself.”
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