Soft X-ray Charged Piezoelectret for Kinetic Energy Harvesting

Piezoelectret polymer attracts much attention for its high piezoelectric coefficient. Multilayered piezoelectret structures are often charged with corona discharge, but it is difficult to get high surface charge density. To address this issue, a multilayered piezoelectret structure with embedded electrode is proposed, which can be efficiently poled with soft X-ray charging. With the aid of embedded electrodes, the bias voltage is directly applied to each unit cell, rather than divided and distributed to multiple layers. With an early PTFE-based prototype, output power of 0.5 μJ has been obtained for 0.3 mm displacement in 0.2 s. (paper)