Study on material performances of lead zirconate titanate/shape memory polyurethane composites combining shape memory and piezoelectric effect

A class of functional composites are compounded by piezoelectric particles and shape memory polymers, and the resultant composites perform both shape memory effect and piezoelectric effect. Although many kinds of piezoelectric composites have been developed, few papers report the effect of interfacial bonding between fillers and matrices on piezoelectric performances. Here, two groups of samples are investigated to clarify the role of interfaces in piezoelectric performances and permittivity properties. The experimental results testify that the samples with poor interfaces exhibit lower relative permittivity and are unable to show usable piezoelectric effect. The piezoelectric effect critically depends on interfacial bonding. Compared with pristine shape memory polymers, interfaces efficiently improve thermodynamics but influence the glass transition temperature very little. Moreover, shape recovery rates all reach at least 95% in the third cycle, even though decrease with the addition of fillers because of increasing interfaces.