• Novel electroactive polymers and polymer systems: Material
designs, synthesis, and characterization. Making use of molecular
and electronic phenomena in polymer and organic materials, novel electroactive
polymeric material systems are designed and fabricated. Recently, his group
has developed electroactive polymers which exhibit a dielectric constant
near 1,000 and can generate strain of higher than 13% with elastic energy
density near 1 J/cm3 under a relatively low applied field.
• Electromechanical materials and devices: actuators and sensors,
transducers, and micro-electromechanical systems, energy harvesting.
Based on the high performance electroactive polymers and composites developed,
various solid state electromechanical devices are investigated, including
MEMS, artificial muscles, energy harvesting, and micro-sensors.
• Dielectric materials and devices: electronic packaging,
capacitors, electric energy storage. The most recent work in this
area is the PVDF based high dielectric constant terpolymers (room temperature
dielectric constant>60) and 0-3 composites which are suitable for high
electric energy density storage capacitors.
• Photonic structures, electro-optic and acousto-optic materials
and devices. Research work in photonic structures focuses on the
micro-machined tunable photonic crystals for reconfigurable waveguide and
tunable optic filter for optic communications.
• Pyroelectric materials and devices. The research
work in this area is mainly based on the relaxor ferroelectric polymer ultra-thin
films developed in Prof. Zhang’s research group which shows high pyroelectric
properties over a relatively broad temperature range.
• Ferroelectric polymer thin and ultrathin films, ink-jet
printing of organic active devices, nano-materials and devices based on
functional polymers.
