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

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 (&Pmacr;[sub r]) as &Pmacr;[sub r](t)=&Pmacr;[sub o]t[sup -x] exp[-c(t/τ)[sup β]]. This function was verified by fitting the dynamics of the fatigue behavior in 0.92Pb(Zn[sub 1/3]Nb[sub 2/3])O[sub 3]-0.08 PbTiO[sub 3] (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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]