Characterization of piezoelectric polymer composites for MEMS devices

Composite piezoelectric ceramics are important materials for transducer applications in medical diagnostic devices and MEMS devices. In micrometer scale the material properties of piezopolymers or piezoceramics do not coincide with that of bulk materials. The present work is aimed at simulating the material properties of piezoceramics and piezo-polymer composite thin films in the micrometer scale and then to determine the piezo-composite material properties. Piezoceramics have very high electromechanical coupling coefficient (k). But they have very high acoustic impedance and they are very brittle especially when thin films are fabricated. Piezopolymer like PVDF has low acoustic impedance and can be fabricated into thin films but it has very low k value and high dielectric losses. The combination of piezoceramics and piezopolymers form the piezocomposites, which have suitable material properties for transducer applications. The composites can have different connectivities. For 2–2 composite, we can select two layers or a stack of PZT and PVDF layers. It is intended to determine the material properties both analytically and by simulation using computer simulation ANSYS software which implements finite element method (FEM). Although the simulation process presents approximate results, it can be verified from the large available experimental data from the literature with the simulated data.