Piezoelectric thin film on glass fiber fabric with structural hierarchy: An approach to high-performance, superflexible, cost-effective, and large-scale nanogenerators

Highlights: • Novel superflexible PENG was fabricated based on glass fiber fabric substrate. • The hierarchical PZT-GFF enables efficient energy harvest and superflexibility. • The designed PENG shows comprehensively high performance for commercial use. • The designed PENG is promising to be used as mechanical sensor as well. -- Abstract: Harvesting mechanical energy using piezoelectric nanogenerator (PENG) to power portable/wearable electronic devices is a promising technology in the age of artificial intelligence. However, high-performance PENGs have often reached with either poor durability, or limited flexibility, or high cost. Here, we select glass fiber fabric (GFF) substrate as a new material platform to enable one-step and large-scale fabrication of high-performance, superflexible PENG based on coherently grown Pb(Zr_0.52Ti_0.48)O₃ thin films via a simple dipping method. With ∼100 nm thick piezoelectric film coated on the 3.5 cm × 1.5 cm scale fabric, this new material platform was measured to show efficient energy harvesting (∼60 V, ∼500 nA) and multi-mode (bending and pressing) energy harvesting ability with largest bending angle of 180°. An 8 cm × 8 cm scale PENG can simultaneously light up 20 commercial green LEDs successfully. Moreover, the PENG based on the new material platform clearly shows a linear change of current/voltage as a function of strain/load, which is promising to be used as self-powered mechanical sensor as well. This work provides a new perspective to fabricate high performance, superflexible, cost-effective and large-scale nanogenerators and thus may enable rapid application in multi-energy harvesters, sensors, battery-free electronic devices.