Modeling Piezoelectric Materials for Active Dust Mitigation

During space exploration missions on lunar or Mars surfaces, improved dust mitigation technologies are in urgent need to protect the crews and equipment. Currently, electrodynamic dust shielding (EDS) is most widely used. The self-sensing transparent piezoelectric surface acoustic wave (TP-SAW) active dust mitigator has been proved to be orders of magnitude higher in energy efficiency than EDS, and it can remove both charged and uncharged particles while EDS can only repel the charged ones. The performance of TP-SAW depends on the piezoelectric coefficient d. Piezoelectric materials such as LiNbO3 can properly function at a very wide range of temperatures (T) from cryogenic to elevated, but their piezoelectric coefficients are small. Relaxor ferroelectric solid solutions such as PMN-PT and PZN-PT, have very large piezoelectric coefficients at room temperature, but these ceramics cannot be used cryogenically. We propose to computationally search/design piezoelectric materials which would have piezoelectric coefficients similar to those of PMN-PT and PZN-PT and which can be used reliably at lunar surface temperature range. We will compute d vs T using the methods developed/tailored for shape memory alloys. The candidate materials will be synthesized and characterized by our experimental collaborators in LaRC.

We propose to computationally search/design piezoelectric materials which would have piezoelectric coefficients similar to those of PMN-PT and PZN-PT and which can be used reliably at lunar surface temperature range. We will compute d vs T using the methods developed/tailored for shape memory alloys. The candidate materials will be synthesized and characterized by our experimental collaborators in LaRC.

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