Effect of Ag nanoparticle concentration on the electrical and ferroelectric properties of Ag/P(VDF-TrFE) composite films

Abstract

We investigated the effect of the Ag nanoparticles on the ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties of Ag/poly(vinylidenefluoride-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) composite films. We found that the remanent polarization and direct piezoelectric coefficient increased up to 12.14 μC/cm^2 and 20.23 pC/N when the Ag concentration increased up to 0.005 volume percent (v%) and decreased down to 9.38 μC/cm^2 and 13.45 pC/N when it increased up to 0.01 v%. Further increase in Ag concentration resulted in precipitation of Ag phase and significant leakage current that hindered any meaningful measurement of the ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties. 46% increase of the remanent polarization value and 27% increase of the direct piezoelectric coefficient were observed in the film with the 0.005 v% of the Ag nanoparticles added without significant changes to the crystalline structure confirmed by both X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) experiments. These enhancements of both the ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties are attributed to the increase in the effective electric field induced by the reduction in the effective volume of P(VDF-TrFE) that results in more aligned dipoles.

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© 2015 Nature Publishing Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Received: 13 January 2015; Accepted: 17 July 2015; Published: 04 September 2015. This research was supported by the Mid-career Researcher Program (No. 2010-0015063) and Conversion Research Center Program (No. 2011K000674) through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) and the New & Renewable Energy of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant (No. 20103020060010) funded by the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, Korea. Work at Argonne National Laboratory (Y.C., S.H., data analysis, and writing of manuscript) was supported by UChicago Argonne, a U.S. DOE Office of Science Laboratory, operated under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357. Author Contributions: H.P. and S.H. wrote the main manuscript text and Y.C. prepared the PFM data and analysis. H.P., Y.C. S.H. and K.N. contributed to the data analysis and reviewed the manuscript. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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