Biodegradable, electro-active chitin nanofiber films for flexible piezoelectric transducers

Abstract

Since the conventional fluorine-based electro-active polymers release toxic residues into the environment during their syntheses and decomposition processes, eco-friendly piezoelectric polymers are urgently demanded in the field of energy-related soft materials. Here, we derive a high-performance biodegradable chitin polymer from squid pen material and demonstrate its utility as a flexible piezoelectric material. The readily controlled ferroelectric chitin film confers excellent piezoelectricity under external mechanical pressure, resulting in comparable performance with that of conventional fluorine-based piezoelectric polymers. In particular, the sufficient piezoelectric behavior in chitin film allows us to not only realize a high-fidelity paper-type speaker and microphone that operates over a wide frequency range without significantly deteriorating the input and output sounds but also demonstrate transparent speaker consisting of AgNWs electrodes onto freestanding chitin film which also enables to resemble the original sound. Finally, the biodegradable chitin polymer can be successfully dissolved by chitinase enzyme within eight days without any toxic residues remained.