The Fabrication of the Electrospun Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) Hollow Structure Fibre for Energy Harvesting Applications

In order to develop ferro electret material, this research aims to produce and investigate energy harvesting performance from a hollow structure polymers using a one-step hollow electro spinning technique. In this study, PVDF (Polyvinylidene fluoride) is used to represent the polar polymer. The obtained hollow and solid structure were characterised in terms of their structural and electromechanical characteristics. The design of the experiment method for producing a hollow fibre structure through electro spinning is discussed in this paper. An SEM (scanning electron microscope) was used to characterise the geometry of the obtained fibres. The geometrical results from the SEM images demonstrate a partial hollow structure for the PVDF electro spun fibres. The partial hollow structure PVDF fibre showed a diameter of around 2 microns. FTIR (Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy) was used to characterise the structural and chemical bonding of the fibres. The FTIR spectra reveal the piezoelectric p-phase in the solid and partially hollow PVDF samples. This agreed with the dominant peak observed from the XRD (X-ray diffractometry) analysis results. In this study, it can be concluded that electro spinning is an effective technique to induce the piezoelectric p-phase of PVDF. The electromechanical characteristics were studied for the solid and partial hollow structure fibres for the PVDF. A tapping test was used to check the obtained samples. The maximum output voltage from the solid PVDF, and partial hollow PVDF were at 6.4 and 8.7 V, respectively. The power density from the solid and partial hollow PVDF electro spun fibre was found at 1.60 and 2.18 mW/m
²
, respectively. The maximum absolute value piezoelectric coefficient for the PVDF hollow fibre group was 28.7 pC/N.