The
successful utilization of Pb-free piezoelectric materials is
considered as critical since the piezoelectric material-based thin-film
cantilever is still the preferred choice for commercial vibrational
energy harvesters. Herein, we introduce a highly efficient piezoelectric
energy harvester based on a Pb-free representative compound, Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3, which has not been explored
so far. Applying a strong electric field for poling purposes brought
unexpectedly huge changes in the dielectric constant and piezoelectric
coefficient, which were responsible for the promising power density
of 21.2 μW/cm2/g2/Hz with 537.7 mV output
voltage and 2.22 μW output power for a 2 μm thick 0.94(Bi0.5Na0.5)TiO3–0.06BaTiO3 thin-film cantilever. The power density value is the best so far
compared with any reported values for thin-film-based harvesters.
As the origin of the effects of poling, the surface potentials across
the grain structure are discussed in conjunction with the defect-dipole
alignment, as evidenced by the increased oxygen vacancies on the film
surface under an external bias field.