Electrowetting-assisted printing of 3D-architectured microelectrodes inside flexible piezoelectric films for sensitive, robust responses to bending deformation

Abstract

The voltage outputs of flexible piezoelectric films after bending deformation have always been limited by two factors, including the incompatible polarization direction with bending strain and the interfacial fatigue failure between the piezoelectric films and the electrode layers, largely hindering the applications in wearable electronics. Herein, we demonstrate a new piezoelectric film design, where 3D-architectured microelectrodes are fabricated inside a piezoelectric film by electrowetting-assisted printing of conductive nano-ink into the pre-formed meshed microchannels in the piezoelectric film. The 3D architectures increase the piezoelectric output of a typical P(VDF-TrFE) film by more than 7 fold compared with the conventional planar design at the same bending radius, and, more importantly, decrease the output attenuation down to only 5.3% after 10 000 bending cycles, less than one third of that for the conventional design. The dependence of piezoelectric outputs on feature sizes of 3D microelectrodes was investigated numerically and experimentally, providing a route for optimizing the 3D architecture design. Different composite piezoelectric films with internal 3D-architectured microelectrodes were fabricated, exhibiting improved piezoelectric outputs under bending deformations, demonstrating that our printing methods could have broad applications in various fields. The fabricated piezoelectric films, worn on human fingers, are used for remotely controlling the robot hand gestures by human–machine interaction; furthermore, the fabricated piezoelectric patches are used to successfully sense the pressure distribution by integrating with spacer arrays to convert the pressing movement into bending deformation, demonstrating the enormous potential of our piezoelectric films in practical applications.