Energy harvesting from the environment based on electroactive polymers has been increasing in recent years. Ferroelectric polymers are used as mechanical‐to‐electrical energy transducers in a wide range of applications, scavenging the surrounding energy to power low‐power devices. These energy‐harvesting systems operate by taking advantage of the piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and magnetoelectric properties of the polymers, harvesting wasted environmental energy and converting it mainly into electrical energy. There have been developed different nano‐ and micro‐scale power harvesters with an increasing interest for powering mobile electronics and low‐power devices, including applications in remote access areas. Novel electronic devices are developed based on low‐power solutions, and therefore, polymer‐based materials represent a suitable solution to power these devices. Among the different polymers, the most widely used in the device application is the poly(vinylidene fluoride) (PVDF) family, due to its higher output performance.
Nanocarbonaceous materials with specific geometries and physicochemical properties allow the development of highperformance polymer-based smart composite materials. Among them, chemical treatments of graphene allow tailoring its electrical conductivity and, therefore, tuning functional response of materials for sensing applications. Polymer-based nanocomposites have been developed from styrene−ethylene−butylene−styrene (SEBS), a high deformation thermoplastic elastomer, and different graphene-based fillers, including graphene oxide (GO), reduced graphene oxide (rGO), and graphene nanoplatelets (G-NPLs). It is shown that the electrical conductivity shows a percolation threshold around 2 wt % for GO and rGO, remaining nearly independent of the filler content for G-NPL filler contents up to 6 wt %. Furthermore, GO/SEBS and rGO/SEBS composites show high piezoresistive sensibility with gauge factors ranging from 15 up to 120 for strains up to 10%. Thus, GO/SEBS and rGO/SEBS composites can represent a new generation of materials for strain sensor applications, as demonstrated in their implementation in a hand glove prototype with finger movement monitoring.
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