Flexoelectric and piezoelectric effects in micro- and nanocellulose films.

In this work, we evaluated the flexoelectric and piezoelectric contributions to the overall macroscopic polarization in cellulose films. To this end, the flexoelectric μ and transverse effective piezoelectric e coefficients of cellulose films were determined using cantilever beam bending. The experiments were based on theoretical developments allowing to separate the flexoelectric from the piezoelectric contribution, represented by an effective flexoelectric coefficient, μ, depending on both e and μ.