Recently, the American Ceramic Society issued online awards in the field of international ceramics in 2020. Professors Li Fei and Xu Zhuo of Xi'an Jiaotong University won the Ross Coffin Purdy Award. The reporter was informed that this is the first time in 35 years that Xi'an Jiaotong University once again aspires to the top of international ceramics.
The American Ceramic Society established the Ross Coffin Purdy Award in 1949 to reward authors who have made the most valuable contributions in the academic literature published in the previous two years in the ceramics field. Only one research achievement is awarded each year in the world.
The team of Professor Xu Zhuo and Professor Li Fei, the Key Laboratory of Electronic Ceramics and Devices of the Ministry of Education, Xi’an Jiaotong University, has been committed to the research of piezoelectric materials for a long time, focusing on the origin and high performance of relaxation ferroelectric single crystals. A lot of scientific research. In 1985, Academician Yao Xi won this award for his research work on "the influence of the piezoelectric resonance of lithium niobate ceramics on its dielectric spectrum". Xi'an Jiaotong University once again won the international ceramic award 35 years later. It demonstrates the profound accumulation and inheritance of Xi'an Jiaotong University in the field of ferroelectric material research.
The winning result of the 2020 Ross Coffin Purdy Award is the team of Professor Xu Zhuo and Professor Li Fei “designing ferroelectric ceramic materials with high-voltage electrical effects”. This achievement has made a breakthrough in the design and synthesis of high-performance piezoelectric ceramics. The structure is disordered, and the Pb(Mg,Nb)O3-PbiTiO3 piezoelectric ceramic doped with rare earth element Sm was synthesized for the first time, and the piezoelectric coefficient of up to 1500 pC/N was obtained, which is twice that of commercial soft piezoelectric ceramics. This work was published in the journal Nature Materials in 2018, and was introduced by the journal News&Views after publication, and published in the journal Science in 2019.