Modeling of fatigue behavior in relaxor piezocrystals: Improved characteristics by Mn substitution

Abstract

The functional form of the time decay of the remanent polarization under high-electrical drives, known as fatigue, has been derived for relaxor piezoelectric materials based on the hierarchical relaxation process, typical of disordered systems such as random-field and glassy states and is given in terms of normalized remanent polarization (P̄r) as P̄r(t)=P̄ot−x exp[−c(t/τ)β]. This function was verified by fitting the dynamics of the fatigue behavior in 0.92Pb(Zn1/3Nb2/3)O3–0.08 PbTiO3 (PZN–PT) relaxor-based piezoelectric system. Mn modification of a PZN–PT single crystal improved the fatigue behavior by slowing down the relaxation processes and pinning the domain wall motion.