Planetary ball milling assisted piezocatalysis for water cleaning application.

Development of the deformation monitoring techniques for the infrastructures so as to avoid catastrophic failure and resulting economic/human loss has remained a key interest of scientists and engineers. Among various deformation monitoring techniques utilized and explored by groups of researchers, electromagnetic radiation detection is one of the intriguing techniques which has remained popular in researchers’ community till today. Almost every type of material is being explored and studied by researchers for the electromagnetic emissions when subjected to external loading and/or failure. Experimental and theoretical investigations are demonstrating these emissions to be a suitable candidate for the deformation monitoring, as a failure predictor and to know about the complex phenomenon of fracture. This article presents extensive literature review and a rigorous discussion on the work done in the past several decades regarding the exploration of electromagnetic emissions from a wide variety of materials and the underlying physical mechanisms. Thus, this review is an attempt to highlight main findings, proposed physical mechanisms, prospective applications, future scope and challenges of the electromagnetic emission detection technique.

Ferroelectric materials with a spontaneous polarization are proven to be potential multicatalysts in water remediation applications. The composition of 0.5Ba(Zr_0.2Ti_0.8)O₃-0.5(Ba_0.7Sr_0.3)TiO₃ (BST-BZT) was examined for photocatalysis, piezocatalysis, and piezo-photocatalysis processes by degrading an azo dye named methylene blue (MB). Generally, dis-aligned dipoles restrict the catalytic activities due to which the BST-BZT powder sample was poled by the corona poling technique. Coupled piezocatalysis and photocatalysis process, i.e., the piezo-photocatalysis process has shown maximum dye degradation. There was a significant improvement in degradation efficiency by using a poled BST-BZT sample compared to the unpoled sample in all processes, thus the results suggest an extensive scope of poled ferroelectric ceramic powder in the catalysis field.