Fabrication of lead zirconium titanium and silica composite films on copper/polyimide flexible substrates

摘要

This paper uses the sol-gel technique to deposit lead zirconium titanium (PZT) and silica composite film onto a copper (Cu)/polyimide (PI) flexible structure at 150 °C. First, the PZT nanoparticles (NPs) were dispersed in a silica sol. Silica sols with different concentrations of PZT particles were spin coated on Cu/PI substrates. Finally, the substrates were sintered at 150 °C to form PZT-silica composite films. The thickness of the PZT-silica composite film was 7 μm with three coatings. The PZT-silica composite films show a random orientation and polycrystalline phase in XRD. The fabricated PZT-silica composite films were then implemented into flexible actuator and flexible sensor applications and were designed in the form of a cantilever beam. For the actuator application, the flexible actuators were lighter than silicon-based actuators and had lower resonance frequencies than silicon-based actuators. The flexible actuators also had a larger tip displacement (400 μm) than silicon-based actuators (14.04 μm) when both of the films were driven by 10 V at the first resonance frequency. For the sensor application, the flexible sensor was excited at the first resonance mode to generate the maximum vibration amplitude. The applied strain and induced charges were compared. In our results, the sensor output was 428 mV, when the size of the electrodes was 10 mm × 10 mm at 42 Hz.