Advances in Engineering Advances in Engineering features breaking research judged by Advances in Engineering advisory team to be of key importance in the Engineering field. Papers are selected from over 10,000 published each week from most peer reviewed journals.
Acta Materialia, Volume 60, Issue 4, February 2012, Pages 1494-1502
G. Tutuncu, M. Motahari, M.R. Daymond, E. Ustundag
Department of Materials Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA
Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
Abstract
High energy X-ray diffraction was employed to probe the complex constitutive behavior of a polycrystalline ferroelectric material in various sample orientations. Pb(Zn,Nb)O3–Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZN–PZT) ceramics were subjected to a cyclic bipolar electric field while diffraction patterns were taken. Using transmission geometry and a two-dimensional detector, lattice strain and texture evolution (domain switching) were measured in multiple sample directions simultaneously. In addition, texture analysis suggests that non-180° domain switching is coupled with lattice strain evolution during uniaxial electrical loading. As a result of this material’s high strain anisotropy, the full-pattern Rietveld method was inadequate to analyze the diffraction data. Instead, a modified Rietveld method, which includes an elastic anisotropy term, yielded significant improvements in the data analysis results.
