Behavior of rigid cubes in soft mediums in agitation or under compression

Saito, Junichi  ; Takesue, Naohisa*; Kiba, Kazumasa*; Kudo, Junki*; Matsuo, Naoki*

In general, piezoelectrics show their highest performance if they are single crystals. However, many of the growth procedures are time-consuming and unpractical, which results in our choice of the sintered polycrystal ceramics for practical use. This general situation causes trade-off between the performance and the effort of process, which motivated us to develop a simple process to obtain the highly-oriented dense integration of piezoelectric single-crystal nanoparticles. Intuitibely saying, the expected process can be realized by using cube- or rectangular-shaped particles, because their plane-to-plane contacts allow their crystallographically oriented ordering to include quite a little space among them. Such the particle is called nanocube, and there have been found the several kinds so far. For this work, the most adequate nanocube is of barium titanate (BT); therefore, we decided to choose BT nanocubes as the model system and exploit a shape of real dices as imitations of the nanocubes for a first trial experiment of this work. In this experiment, dices are mechanically agitated or pressed in soft mediums such as polyvinyl alcohol, and continuous monitoring of the dices are done during the mechanical operations. The results will be presented in the meeting.