The effect of the reorientation of 90° domains on the electric-field-induced strains was studied for tetragonal lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramics. An in situ X-ray diffraction (XRD) method was used to evaluate the 90° domain reorientation under electric fields. The strains caused by the reorientation were calculated and compared with the electric-field-induced longitudinal strains measured with a laser displacement meter and the strains expected from piezoelectric d-constants. It was experimentally confirmed that the electric-field-induced strains of PZT ceramics were composed of strains due to the piezoelectric effect and the 90° reorientation. After poling treatment, a small portion of the 90° domains relaxed and reoriented, giving rise to a reversible reorientation of the 90° domains by the electric field. These reversible reorientations contributed to the electric-field-induced strains. In “soft” PZT ceramics, the degrees of 90° reorientation caused by poling and by the subsequent application of an electric field had a close correlation with the tetragonality of the crystal lattice rather than with the coercive field.

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A novel computational fluid dynamics analysis method of predicting semiconductor junction temperatures precisely without modeling printed circuit board (PCB) line patterns was developed. First, PCBs are divided into multiple regions. The effective anisotropic thermal conductivity of each region is then assigned as follows. All the regions are divided into smaller subregions whose size is below the pattern width. The thermal conductivity of each subregion is defined by the property of the material at the center of the subregion. Next, a thermal circuit network composed of all the subregions is generated, and finally the anisotropic thermal conductivities of each region are computed by solving this thermal network matrix. When boards are divided into multiple regions, there is a convergence region size under which the analytical results show no further change. In this paper, the relationship between the size of the divided regions and the accuracy of the analytical results was investigated. It was confirmed that the calculated semiconductor junction temperatures were precisely coincident with the experimental results when the size of the regions was less than 20 times the line pattern width.