Predictions of Energy Content in Stretched Ribbons of Segmented Polymer Piezoelectrics

Polymer piezoelectrics such as poly vinyldene fluoride (PVDF) offer advantages such as low temperature fabrication into large area flexible sheets. A primary advantage of this is that large sheets of PVDF can be stretched into membranes to build sensors and energy harvesters that have low resonant frequencies. A key result reported recently is that when polymer piezoelectrics membranes are provided non-uniform stress, the use of segmented electrodes helps improve energy content by reducing surface currents. Using this key result in conjunction with experiments performed on stretched ribbons of PVDF, we predict energy densities obtained via electrode segmentation in this paper.