Radiation-Hardened and Flexible Pb(Zr0.53Ti0.47)O3 Piezoelectric Sensor for Structural Health Monitoring

Piezoelectric sensors are excellent damage detectors that can be applied to structural health monitoring (SHM). SHM for complex structures of aerospace vehicles working in harsh conditions is frequently required, posing challenging requirements for a sensor’s flexibility, radiation hardness, and high-temperature tolerance. Here, we fabricate a flexible and lightweight Pb(Zr 0.53 Ti 0.47 )O 3 piezoelectric film on flexible KMg 3 (AlSi 3 O 10 )F 2 substrate via van der Waals (vdW) heteroepitaxy, endowing it with robust ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties under low energy-high flux protons (LE-HFPs) radiation (10 15 p/cm 2 ). More importantly, the Pb(Zr 0.53 Ti 0.47 )O 3 film sensor maintains highly stable damage monitoring sensitivity on an aluminum plate under harsh conditions of LE-HFPs radiation (10 15 p/cm 2, flat structure), high temperature (175 °C, flat structure), and mechanical fatigue (bending 10 5 cycles under a radius of 5 mm, curved structure). All these superior qualities are suggested to result from the outstanding film crystal quality due to vdW epitaxy. The flexible and lightweight Pb(Zr 0.53 Ti 0.47 )O 3 film sensor demonstrated in this work provides an ideal candidate for real - time SHM of aerospace vehicles with flat and complex curve-like structures working in harsh aerospace environments.