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Pyroelectric materials can harvest energy from naturally occurring ambient temperature change, as well as fromartificial temperature change, notably from industrial activity. At a time of climate emergency, pyroelectric energy harvesting is a highly promising technology that should ultimately lead to the development of autonomous and self-powered electronic devices and which has the potential to harvest enormous amount of wasted heat. One interesting but rarely studied class of pyroelectric materials are non-ferroelectric pyroelectrics; these include semiconductor materials with a wurtzite crystalline structure such as CdS, ZnO or ZnS. We studied ZnS, and explored a simple, co-precipitation synthesis for nanocrystalline wurtzite ZnS production. The structural, morphological and dielectric properties of two selected samples were investigated to examine the effects of different molar concentrations of precursor Zn and S ions (mMZn/mMS = 0.47 and 1.22) in the reactive solution. Alongside these results, we present our recently built in-house semi-pilot plant that is able to produce substantial amounts of wurtzite ZnS nanopowder in an environmentally friendly and cost effective way. The obtained ZnS nanopowder is intended both as a precursor for pyroelectric ceramics and as a filler for ferroelectric polymer-based composite thin films (PVDF co-polymers). Acknowledgement: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 797951.This project was also partially supported by the Piano triennale di realizzazione 2019-2021 della ricerca di sistema elettrico nazionale – Progetto 1.3 Materiali di frontiera per usi energetici (C.U.P. code: I34I19005780001). |
