We present a method to develop high performance flexible piezoelectric nanogenerators (NGs) by employing Li-doped ZnO nanowires (NWs). We synthesized Li-doped ZnO NWs and adopted them to replace intrinsic ZnO NWs with a relatively low piezoelectric coefficient. When we exploited the ferroelectric phase transition induced in Li-doped ZnO NWs, the performance of the NGs was significantly improved and the NG fabrication process was greatly simplified. In addition, our approach can be easily expanded for large-scale NG fabrication. Consequently, the NGs fabricated by our simple method exhibit the excelling output voltage and current, which are stable and reproducible during periodic bending/releasing measurement over extended cycles. In addition, output voltage and current up to ∼ 180 V and ∼ 50 μA, respectively, were obtained in the large-scale NG. The approach introduced here extends the performance limits of ZnO-based NGs and their potentials in practical applications.
Keywords: ferroelectricity; flexible electronics; lithium doped zinc oxide nanowires; piezoelectric nanogenerator.