Corona: An effective polarization strategy of polymer composites with high-k filler for piezoelectric nanogenerators

Piezoelectric nanogenerators (PENGs) are mushrooming owing to demand of swift transformation of power supply from fossil fuel to green energy. Piezoelectric ceramics are enthusiastically chased because glorious PENGs demand for high piezoelectricity. Generally, brittleness of ceramics can be compensated by polymer, while the dielectric mismatch between low permittivity of polymer and high permittivity of ceramics plaguing researchers so long. Traditional contact poling is always interrupted by abrupt dielectric breakdown due to electric field concentration at interface between polymer and fillers. Here, we propose a strategy of using corona polarization instead of traditional contact polarization to insistently polarize large-area polymer composite films with high-k filler. The corona polarization technique can ignore the negative effect of local short circuit on polarization failure owing to prominent lateral insulation between deposited charges on surface of composites film, consequently obtaining well-performed piezoelectricity. Henceforth, polarization failure did not occur using corona even under poling voltage of 26 kV. The corona-poled PVDF/Y-ZnO PENG with only 15 wt% content of fillers generated output power density of ∼1064 μW/cm. Our work will pilot the development of polymer composites with high-k filler and piezoelectric nanogenerators.