Application of a graphical method to the domain switching of ferroelectrics subjected to electromechanical loading

摘要

A change in the system Gibbs free energy can be used as a criterion for spontaneous reactions, including the ferroelectric domain switching process. In this work, a new effective graphical method is introduced to investigate the change in the Gibbs free energy of a grain system and intuitively represent the domain switching state since its expression is too complex to study directly. A barium titanate crystal is considered as an example, and only 90 degrees domain switching is involved. We can obtain two kinds of applications by virtue of the graphical method by controlling different variables in the change of the free energy: one application involves a new form of a ferroelectric domain switching criterion that considers the effect of the grain size, and the other application involves the critical single-domain grain size. For different loading methods, there will be different critical single-domain grain sizes in ferroelectrics.