Flexible Smart Textile Coated by PVDF/Graphene Oxide With Excellent Energy Harvesting Toward a Novel Class of Self-Powered Sensors: Fabrication, Characterization and Measurements

Because of some of their diverse benefits, intelligent textiles have attracted a great deal of interest among specialists over the past decade. This paper describes a novel approach to the manufacture of intelligent piezoelectric polymer-based textiles with enhanced piezoelectric responses for applications that extract biomechanical energy. Here we report a highly scalable and ultrafast production of smart textile piezoelectric containing graphene oxide nanosheets (GONS) dispersed in polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF). In this work, Cotton textiles (CT) were functionalized and by graphene oxide (GO), using PVDF as a binder to obtain a CT-PVDF-GO material. Tetraethyl orthosilicate (TEOS) was further grafted as a coating layer to improve the surface compatibility, resulting in the CT-PVDF-GO-TEOS composite. The research results show that the addition of GONS significantly improves PVDF's overall crystallization rate on CT. More specifically, the piezoelectric β-phase content (100 % higher F[β]) and crystallinity degree on the piezoelectric properties of composite cotton fiber has been improved effectively. Consequently, this fabricated piezo-smart textile has a glorious piezoelectricity even with comparatively low coating content of PVDF-GONS-TEOS. Based on it, the as-fabricated piezoelectric textile device has resulted in the output voltage of up to 13 mV for a given frequency (fm = 8 Hz) at fixed strain amplitude value (0.5 %). It is believed that this research may further reveal the field of energy harvesting for possible applications in the future.. In addition, the set of experimental results that illustrate the smart textile was carried out and discussed, and how it can be used as a wearable device source for this smart textile. Finally, the approach described in this study can also be used to construct other desirable designs, for a wearable low-consumption sensor, etc.