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Abstract Creating a piezoelectric or pyroelectric material from a ferroelectric material requires aligning its ferroelectric domains to achieve a remanent polarization. This complex process involves nucleating/growing domain structures and inducing a macroscopic, non-centrosymmetric symmetry under an applied electric field. For many years, this process has not received significant attention. Typically, DC fields are applied at elevated temperatures to align the domain states, balancing the depolarization and screening fields in a metastable state that is still near equilibrium. In contrast, the pulse poling (PP) strategy uses field pulses much faster than the time it takes for depolarization and bulk screening processes to occur. This instability allows the PP of relaxor ferroelectric (RFE) crystals and textured ceramics to induce a new far-from-equilibrium (FFE) state, which has enhanced properties compared to conventional DC poling. RFE crystals are of interest because it is known that poling them in specific directions creates engineered domain structures that provide giant piezoelectric properties with low hysteretic losses. By applying PP to RFE crystals in the < 001 > direction, significant changes in the electromechanical properties within the FFE state were observed, which opens new high-performance opportunities for these materials in transducer applications. This review outlines the property enhancements with PP and their origins while modeling the properties with a phenomenological thermodynamic approach. The properties are discussed with respect to transducer applications and benchmarked to other traditional poling strategies. Mn: PMN-PIN-PT, Mn: PMN-PZT, and Sm: PMN-PIN-PT are primarily used as model systems to demonstrate enhanced electromechanical performance with PP over other conventional poling strategies. Given the new concepts discussed in this paper, there is also a future research section at the end of the paper to drive the innovation beyond this initial work. Graphical abstract
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This content will become publicly available on December 1, 2027
BARCODE: high throughput screening and analysis of soft active materials
Abstract Active, responsive, non-equilibrium materials–at the forefront of materials engineering–offer dynamical restructuring, mobility and other complex life-like properties. Yet, this enhanced functionality comes with significant amplification of the size and complexity of the datasets needed to characterize their properties, thereby challenging conventional approaches to analysis. To meet this need, we present BARCODE: Biomaterial Activity Readouts to Categorize, Optimize, Design and Engineer, an open-access software that automates high throughput screening of microscopy video data to enable non-equilibrium material optimization and discovery. BARCODE produces a unique fingerprint or ‘barcode’ of performance metrics that visually and quantitatively encodes dynamic material properties with minimal file size. Using three complementary material-agnostic analysis branches, BARCODE significantly reduces data dimensionality and size, while providing rich, multiparametric outputs and rapid tractable characterization of activity and structure. We analyze a series of datasets of cytoskeleton networks and cell monolayers to demonstrate BARCODE’s abilities to accelerate and streamline screening and analysis, reveal unexpected correlations and emergence, and enable broad non-expert data access, comparison, and sharing.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1933487
- PAR ID:
- 10690381
- Publisher / Repository:
- Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 17
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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