Electrostrictive and Piezoelectric Effects in Relaxor Ferroelectrics: Historical Background

Abstract

Electrostrictive effects in complex-perovskite "relaxor" ferroelectrics (FEs) exhibit superior performance in comparison with the simple-perovskite normal FEs, such as giant electrostriction in its paraelectric phase and high electromechanical coupling in its FE phase. As one of the discoverers, the author will deliver the historical background of these epoch-making phenomena and the development strategy of how we considered performance improvement. Though both discoveries were actually originated from a sort of "serendipity" (lucky & accidental occurrence!), some of the key factors have been embedded in the research base: 1) interrelation between complex perovskite structure and ferroelectricity; 2) anharmonicity in relaxor FEs; and 3) microdomain contribution in relaxor FEs. In the last part of this article, the author introduces a bit different "mesoscopic" approach, "fractal analysis of microdomain configuration" in conjunction with the "domain engineering" concept, to distinguish the electromechanical coupling among the normal and relaxor FEs for remaining the future research seeds.

Chemical-Composition Tuning-Enabled Optimization of Structure, Properties, and Performance of Lead-Free (1 – x)BaZr0.05Ti0.95O3–(x)Ba0.92Ca0.08TiO3 Electroceramics

“…The inclusive relation extends to the complete exploration of piezoelectric properties, specifically the piezoelectric coefficient ( d 33 ), discussed in the subsequent sections. The piezoelectric coefficient ( d 33 ) values are calculated (see Table ) using the following equation: d 33 = 2 Q ε ′ ε 0 P s where Q is the electrostrictive coefficient, ε′ is the real part of the dielectric constant, ε 0 is the permittivity of free space, and P s is the spontaneous polarization. It is seen from Table that the composition with x = 0.50 emerges as the most suitable material, as it shows the highest piezoelectric coefficient value of 199 pC/N.…”

Piezoelectric Actuators – Recent Innovations 2024 –

“…After the discovery of huge piezoelectric performances in PbZrO3-PbTiO3 (PZT) ceramics in the middle of 1950s [9,10], these PZT compositions have been the majestic industrial materials up to now for 70 years. On the contrary, a research fever on actuator applications was ignited in 1979 by the discovery of giant electrostriction in Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 (PMN-PT) ceramics [11][12][13][14]. Though the non-hysteretic PMN-based electrostrictive actuators have successfully been utilized in a Hubble telescope on the Space Shuttle by NASA [15], their large capacitance of the electrostrictive multilayers limited the high-speed applications with wide commercialization.…”

Ferroelectric film-based stretch sensor with successive stretch and release motions characterized by a combined piezoelectric and electrostrictive effect

“…The effect of electrostriction can be formulated using the elastic Gibbs energy [37][38][39]. Expanding the Gibbs function in 1D form [40], we obtain…”