This paper presents a new additive manufacturing (AM) process to directly and continuously print piezoelectric devices from polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymeric filament rods under a strong electric field. This process, called ‘electric poling-assisted additive manufacturing or EPAM, combines AM and electric poling processes and is able to fabricate free-form shape piezoelectric devices continuously. In this process, the PVDF polymer dipoles remain well-aligned and uniform over a large area in a single design, production and fabrication step. During EPAM process, molten PVDF polymer is simultaneously mechanically stresses in-situ by the leading nozzle and electrically poled by applying high electric field under high temperature. The EPAM system was constructed to directly print piezoelectric structures from PVDF polymeric filament while applying high electric field between nozzle tip and printing bed in AM machine. Piezoelectric devices were successfully fabricated using the EPAM process. The crystalline phase transitions that occurred from the process were identified by using the Fourier transform infrared spectroscope. The results indicate that devices printed under a strong electric field become piezoelectric during the EPAM process and that stronger electric fields result in greater piezoelectricity as marked by the electrical response and the formation of sharper peaks at the polar β crystalline wavenumber of the PVDF polymer. Performing this process in the absence of an electric field does not result in dipole alignment of PVDF polymer. The EPAM process is expected to lead to the widespread use of AM to fabricate a variety of piezoelectric PVDF polymer-based devices for sensing, actuation and energy harvesting applications with simple, low cost, single processing and fabrication step.

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This paper presents the method of a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) posture measurement in a linear stage by employing a single unit of an optical encoder. The proposed optical encoder was constructed to simultaneously measure the posture along the traveling axis; angular errors, pitch, yaw and roll; and translational errors, ΔX, ΔY and ΔZ. It consists of a diffractive optical element, a corner cube, four separate two-dimensional position-sensitive detectors, four photodiodes and auxiliary optics components. The circularly polarizing interferometric technique was integrated to measure the displacement of the stage along the traveling axis in a robust manner and the resolution was estimated to be less than 0.4 nm. Two types of stages were employed for the measurement implementation, the piezoelectric transducer-driven and the ballscrew-driven, and they were feedback-controlled for the traveling axis, respectively. With a single travel of the stage, it provided a six-DOF motion error with a high resolution, less than 0.03 arcsec, 20 nm and 0.4 nm for angular errors, ΔY and ΔZ, and ΔX, respectively, at the same time. As a result, it was seen that motion errors of the stage have relevance to the driving mechanism and the whole construction of the stage.

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