XJTU Developed Rare Earth Element-Doped Piezoceramics

Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) has developed the rare earth element Sm-doped piezoceramics, leading the frontier development of international ceramics. Recently, the American Ceramic Society issued online awards in the field of international ceramics in 2020. Professors Li Fei and Xu Zhuo of Xi'an Jiaotong University won the Ross Coffin Purdy Award. After 35 years, the university once again aspires to the top of international ceramics!

Piezoelectric ceramics, such as lead zirconate titanate (PZT) and barium titanate (BaTiO₃), have been widely used as sensors and actuators. Recently, they have also gained popularity for use in energy harvesting devices. Their inherently high electromechanical coupling properties are appealing for actuator applications, where relatively small electric field inputs are sufficient to actuate the ferroelectric ceramics.

However, the brittle nature of ceramics limits their applications to only small deformations. In electromechanical devices, several characteristics may be required, such as light weight, high electromechanical coupling constants, low thermal expansion and conductivity, mechanical flexibility and compliance, etc. For this purpose, electroactive composites with several different constituents have been considered.

The American Ceramic Society (ACerS) is a non-profit professional organization for the ceramics community, with a focus on scientific research, emerging technologies, and applications in which ceramic materials are an element. It is located in Westerville, Ohio. The American Ceramic Society established the Ross Coffin Purdy Award in 1949 to reward authors who made the most valuable contributions to the academic literature published in the ceramics field in the first two years. Only one research achievement is awarded each year in the world.

In 1985, Academician Yao Xi won this award for his research work on "the influence of the piezoelectric resonance of lithium niobate ceramics on its dielectric spectrum". XJTU once again won the international ceramic award 35 years later. It demonstrates the profound accumulation and inheritance of the university in the field of ferroelectric material research.

The winning result of the Ross Coffin Purdy Award in 2020 is the team of Professor Xu Zhuo and Li Fei of the Key Laboratory of Electronic Ceramics and Devices of the Ministry of Education of Xi’an Jiaotong University “Designing Ferroelectric Ceramic Materials with High Voltage Electric Effect”. A breakthrough has been made in the design and synthesis of ceramics. By introducing local structural disorder, the rare earth element Sm-doped Pb (Mg, Nb) O₃-PbiTiO₃ piezoceramics was synthesized for the first time, and the piezoelectric coefficient of up to 1500 pC/N was obtained. It is twice that of commercial soft piezoceramics.

This result was published in the journal Nature Materials in 2018, and was introduced by the journal News & Views after publication, and published in the journal Science in 2019.

Besides the rare earth element-dope piezoceramics, the team of Professor Xu Zhuo and Professor Li Fei, the Key Laboratory of Electronic Ceramics and Devices of the Ministry of Education at XJTU, has long been committed to the research of piezoelectric materials, focusing on the origin and high performance of relaxor ferroelectric single crystals.

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