Study of the optoelectronic and piezoelectric properties of ZrO2 doped PVDF from quantum chemistry calculations

In this study, we have evaluated the optoelectronic and piezoelectric properties of doped PVDF. The electronic structures and the linear and non-linear optical properties of ZrO2-doped PVDF were calculated by adopting the LDA approximations for the exchange-correlation potential in the DFT method integrated in Gaussian 09. Optoelectronic parameters and ground state molecular geometry were calculated using B3LYP functional and LanL2DZ as the basis. We chose the calculation with the B3LYP functional because it is a relatively inexpensive and it is precise method to predict molecular structures, energies and frequencies. In this work, some optical parameters and constants such as refractive index, electrical susceptibility, dipole moment, average polarizability and hyperpolarizability, phase velocity have been calculated. Dielectric constants, ionization potentials, electronic affinities, electronegativities, hardness and flexibility were also calculated. Finally, the piezoelectric properties such as the piezoelectric coefficient and the pyroelectric coefficient are evaluated. The calculated electronic structures show that virgin PVDF, hybrid molecules PVDF/2ZrO2 and PVDF/3ZrO2 have an E_gap less than 3 eV. On the other hand, the hybrid PVDF/ZrO2 molecule is a good dielectric and therefore a good piezoelectric nanocomposite because its E_gap is 5.89 eV greater than 3 eV. Finally, the results show that the hybrid molecules PVDF-2ZrO2 could have potential applications not only as piezoelectric materials but also as semiconductor components, nonlinear optical materials and possible building materials for molecular electronics and photonic devices.