Piezoelectrets from thermo-formed bubble structures of fluoropolymer-electret films

Cellular and porous polymers with internal bipolar space charge can exhibit large piezoelectric thickness coefficients and have therefore led to significant advances in the understanding and the application of piezoelectricity in polymer electrets. As possible alternatives to these cellular ferroelectrets, other potentially useful configurations of space-charge electrets, such as bi-layer or multi-layer stacks of at least one "soft" porous and one "hard" non-porous electret film have been suggested and investigated. Extending the concept of cellular or porous polymer electrets with microscopic voids, we propose and describe novel piezoelectret structures with regular arrays of millimeter-sized bubbles that are formed between fluoro-ethylene-propylene (TeflongFEP) films via a vacuum-assisted thermal process. After internal charging by means of high impulse voltages, the bubble structures exhibit rather large piezoelectric activities in their thickness direction, with phenomenological quasi-static d33 coefficients of up to 500 pC/N (or pm/V) which quite strongly decrease with the amplitude of the applied force. The electromechanical behavior of the new piezoelectrets has been modeled in analogy to the operation of electret microphones.