Exploring the piezoelectric porous polymers for energy harvesting: a review

Abstract In addition to traditional piezoelectric polymers, mono-crystals and ceramics, piezoelectrets or charged voided polymers have shown an interesting piezoelectric response by converting the mechanical energy into electrical and vice versa, therefore being incorporated in a number of advanced electromechanical transducers. This article is a review on the different phases for the elaboration of pseudo piezoelectric films based on passive polymers. First, several methods for the elaboration of the cellular structure of these materials are explained in the main text, with the morphological representation of the reached porosity. The porosity represents a cell to embed the positive and negative electrical charges created by the most common electrical charging processes, which are subsequently mentioned. Different theoretical models are emphasized as well to predict the piezoelectric behavior of this porous polymers. Finally, some of the latest harvesting energy applications based on porous polymers are collected. All the considerations cited above make Piezoelectric porous polymers open access materials that can be developed and optimized by the control of the porosity then used in energy harvesting applications.