Almusallam, AhmedLuo, Zhen-HuaKomolafe, AbiodunYang, KaiRobinson, AndrewTorah, RusselBeeby, Steve2017-07-072017-07-072017-01-17Ahmed Almusallam, Zhenhua Luo, Abiodun Komolafe, Kai Yang, Andrew Robinson, Russel Torah, Steve Beeby, Flexible piezoelectric nano-composite films for kinetic energy harvesting from textiles, Nano Energy, Volume 33, March 2017, Pages 146-1562211-2855http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2017.01.037http://dspace.lib.cranfield.ac.uk/handle/1826/12172This paper details the enhancements in the dielectric and piezoelectric properties of a low-temperature screen-printable piezoelectric nano-composite film on flexible plastic and textile substrates. These enhancements involved adding silver nano particles to the nano-composite material and using an additional cold isostatic pressing (CIP) post-processing procedure. These developments have resulted in a 18% increase in the free-standing piezoelectric charge coefficient d33 to a value of 98 pC/N. The increase in the dielectric constant of the piezoelectric film has, however, resulted in a decrease in the peak output voltage of the composite film. The potential for this material to be used to harvest mechanical energy from a variety of textiles under compressive and bending forces has been evaluated theoretically and experimentally. The maximum energy density of the enhanced piezoelectric material under 800 N compressive force was found to be 34 J/m3 on a Kermel textile. The maximum energy density of the enhanced piezoelectric material under bending was found to be 14.3 J/m3 on a cotton textile. These results agree very favourably with the theoretical predictions. For a 10x10 cm piezoelectric element 100 µm thick this equates to 38 μJ and 14.3 μJ of energy generated per mechanical action respectively which is a potentially useful amount of energy.enAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/PiezoelectricNano-compositeEnergy harvestingTextilesScreen printedArticle16330962