Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on smart materials focus on piezoelectric materials. In terms of the global perspective, the world has undergone two drastic material-based ages during the past centuries – composite and plastic ages. Concurrently, in the midst of these two noted ages, a new era has become dominant and recognizable [1-4]. This is the era of smart materials. In relation to early definitions, smart/functional materials are those materials that adversely respond to their environment within a shorter time. It is imperative to note that the definition of functional/smart materials has been diversified to materials capable of receiving, transmitting, or processing stimuli such as temperature, stress, strain, pH stimuli, magnetic and electric fields, different radiation types, hydrostatic pressure among other forms of stimuli [5]. They react to this by being capable of producing a useful outcome that may comprise a signal that the materials act upon [1].

The end result of this can be caused by a series of events integrated together, a chemical reaction, absorption of a proton, translation or rotation of molecular structure segments, initiation and shifting of crystallographic flaws or other localized conformations, modification of localized strain and stress ?elds, among others. The effects fabricated can be a disparity in colour, dissimilarity in the refraction indexes, imbalances in the disposition of stresses and strains, or variations in volume.

For a material to be classified to be smart/functional, its action of receiving and afterwards responding to stimuli in order to produce a useful outcome must be reversible. Additionally, it should be asymmetrical in nature, and this relates majorly to piezoelectric materials. Other functional materials manifest similar traits. However, scientists have performed little research in tandem with this observation [1].

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