Effect of Crystal Orientation on Polarization in Piezoelectric Materials

This work highlights the computational application of a nonlinear constitutive model to determine the impact of crystal orientation with respect to both initial poling direction and applied electrical fields. Misalignment between material axes and loading axes can occur during the fabrication process and may exhibit desirable performance feature for actuator design. The analysis showed that small angles of loading and material axes misalignment such as may occur in fabrication (less than 5 degrees) have minor impact on material performance, and that the liner response range of these materials can be expanded by increased levels of constraint at the cost of maximum actuation strain. For larger angles, variations in loading and material axes misalignment angles can have a significant impact on performance.