Advances in Polymer-Based Piezoelectric Systems

Introduction

Energy is much obligatory and the ever decreasing size of electronic gadgets coupled with augmented ask for sustainable energy have led the scientific community to design and develop self powered gadgets that do not ask for any external power, either continuous or punctuated (Atzori et al., 2010). These self powered gadgets mostly make use of ambient and harness-able energies. Piezoelectricty is one such approach of energy recovery that essentially involves vibration-to- electricity energy conversion (Henry, 2004) via buttressing of electrical charges under applied stress. The most distinguished characteristic of this kind of mechanical energy harvesting was initially identified for low frequency power generation applications. Therefore, one of the prominent targeted applications of vibration to electricity energy conversion is to power micro-electronic devices.Nevertheless, vibrational-to-electrical energy conversion involves one of the three thriving mechanisms of energy transduction namely; electrostatic, electromagnetic and piezoelectric (Williams & Rob 1996). All of which have been thoroughly investigated over the last few decades. If the vibrational force is converted electrical energy via electric filed, then the transduction is electrostatic, if magnetic field is the transduction medium, then electromagnetic and if strain is involved, then it is termed piezoelectric.