Characterisation and Modelling of Meshed Electrodes on Free Standing Polyvilylidene Difluoride (PVDF) Films for Enhanced Pyroelectric Energy Harvesting.

Flexible pyroelectric energy generators provide unique features for harvesting temperature fluctuations which can be effectively enhanced using meshed electrodes that improve thermal conduction, convection and radiation into the pyroelectric. In this paper, thermal radiation energy is continuously harvested with pyroelectric free standing Polyvilylidene Difluoride (PVDF) films over a large number of heat heat cycles using a novel micro-sized symmetrical patterned meshed electrode. It is shown that, for the meshed electrode geometries considered in this work, the polarisation-field (P-E), current-field (I-E) characteristics and device capacitance are unaffected since the fringing fields were generally small; this is verified using numerical simulations and comparison with experimental measurements. The use of meshed electrodes has been shown to significantly improve both the open circuit voltage (16 V to 59 V) and closed-circuit current (9 nA to 32 nA). The pyroelectric alternating current (AC) is rectified for direct current (DC) storage and 30% reduction in capacitor charging time is achieved by using the optimum meshed electrodes. The use of meshed electrodes on ferroelectric materials provides an innovative route to improve their performance in applications such as wearable devices, novel flexible sensors and large scale pyroelectric energy harvesters.hese instructions give you guidelines for preparing papers for IEEE Transactions and Journals. Use this document as a template if you are using Microsoft Word 6.0 or later. Otherwise, use this document as an instruction set. The electronic file of your paper will be formatted further at IEEE. Paper titles should be written in uppercase and lowercase letters, not all uppercase. Avoid writing long formulas with subscripts in the title; short formulas that identify the elements are fine (e.g., "Nd-Fe-B"). Do not write "(Invited)" in the title. Full names of authors are preferred in the author field, but are not required. Put a space between authors' initials. Define all symbols used in the abstract. Do not cite references in the abstract. Do not delete the blank line immediately above the abstract; it sets the footnote at the bottom of this column.