Events

Dr Dou Zhang, Fabricating piezoelectric composites for smart applications

Date: Wednesday 12 September 2012 11:00 - 12:00

Location: Nanoforce Seminar Room

Fabricating piezoelectric composites for smart applications
Dr Dou Zhang, Central South University, China.
State Key Laboratory of Powder Metallurgy, Central South University, Changsha, P.R. China
email: dzhang@csu.edu.cn / zhangdou@gmail.com

Over the past few decades, piezoelectric materials attracted great attention for the development of smart materials and structures. Monolithic and/or multilayered piezoceramics are typical piezoelectric materials used in many actuation and sensing applications. In order to overcome the inherent brittleness, stiffness, and the additional mass factor of piezoceramic in practical applications, composites route has been explored extensively in a wide range of compositional and structural configurations by introducing a second phase, normally epoxy resin polymer, to form the piezocomposites1.
This talk summarised our piezocomposites work covering the fabrication, characterisation and applications of 1-3 typed piezocomposites2, piezoelectric fiber composites, and more recently porous bio-piezocomposites. Emphasis will be put on related processing, including gel-casting3, viscous plastic process4, and freeze casting5. The correlations between the processing, microstructures and the properties will be presented.

References:
[1] Composite electroceramics, Ferroelectrics, 1986, 68, 1-32.
[2] Piezoelectric 1-3 composites for high frequency ultrasonic transducer applications, Ferroelectrics, 2004, 304, 201-205
[3] Gelcasting of alumina ceramics with improved green strength, Ceramic International, 2012, 38, 6923-6926
[4] Embossing of ceramic micro-pillar arrays, Journal of European Ceramic Society, 2012, 32, 3345-3349
[5] Porous hydroxyapatite ceramics fabricated by an ice-templating method, Scripta Materialia, 2011, 64, 426-429

Short CV:
Dou Zhang received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees from the Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China in 1992 and 1995, respectively, and Ph.D. degree from the University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, U.K., in 2006. In 2004, he became a Research Associate and, in 2006, a Research Fellow with the Functional Materials Group, University of Birmingham. In 2009, he joined the State Key Laboratory of Powder Metallurgy, Central South University, Changsha, China, and was appointed as the Professor in 2010. His current research interests involve the fabrication and characterization of ferroelectric and piezoelectric ceramics, films, composites, and devices.