Very high pressure behavior of precisely-poled PVDF

Ferroelectric polymers with well defined and precisely known electrical properties are now routinely available from commercial sources. Electrical processing with the Bauer cyclic poling method can routinely produce individual samples with a range of remanent polarizations up to 9 μC/cm2. Such well defined samples provide an unusual opportunity to carry out experiments which study the structure and physical properties of the materials. In the present case, the behavior of PVDF has been studied over a wide range of pressures with the destructive, but precise, method of very-high-pressure shock loading. The method of loading provides accuracy and precision of pressure of about 1%. In studies to 10 GPa, the nonlinear piezoelectric behavior of PVDF is carefully studied. Studies to pressures of 30 GPa are available which show that the piezoelectric behavior is linearly dependent on volume compression to a close approximation.