The research results are published online in Science.

A research team led by Professor Li Fei from the School of Electronic Science and Engineering and the State Key Laboratory for Mechanical Behavior of Materials at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU), in collaboration with other researchers, has developed textured piezoelectric ceramics with piezoelectric performance comparable to single crystals using machine learning-assisted design. The research results were published online in the journal Science under the title Overcoming the performance ceiling of textured piezoelectric ceramics.

The research team improved the topochemical microcrystal conversion method and developed a series of new microcrystal templates rich in strongly diffusing Zr ions. Compared with traditional BaTiO₃ templates, these new templates show greater stability during solid-state sintering.

At the same time, they established a high-quality performance dataset for relaxor ferroelectric ceramics and used machine learning to develop a model capable of predicting the piezoelectric performance and Curie temperature of relaxor ferroelectric ceramics.

Through this model, they used a key advantage of textured ceramics over single-crystal materials: greater compositional tunability. By introducing appropriate amounts of polar nanoregions into the textured ceramics via rare-earth element doping, they developed Sm-Pb(In_1/2Nb_1/2)O₃-Pb(Sc_1/2Nb_1/2)O₃-PbTiO₃ textured piezoelectric ceramics with piezoelectric performance comparable to single crystals for the first time.

The ceramics achieved a piezoelectric coefficient of d₃₃=1720 pC/N and an electromechanical coupling factor of k₃₃=0.93, while also showing significant advantages in mechanical strength and coercive field.

Furthermore, the team utilized these high-performance textured piezoelectric ceramics to develop a vector accelerometer. This accelerometer demonstrates sensitivity far superior to that of piezoelectric single crystals and traditional lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramics, while maintaining stability and fatigue characteristics similar to traditional ceramic devices. This shows that the material can combine the high sensitivity of single crystals with the excellent stability and reliability of ceramics.

The new textured piezoelectric ceramic materials are expected to create new opportunities to enhance performance in devices such as medical ultrasound probes, high-sensitivity sensors, and piezoelectric fans for chip cooling.