Summary

Abstract

The present document provides a summary of fatigue effects in PZT found in measurements by the author and interpreted in the framework of a large body of literature existing in this and neighboring subjects. Surprisingly, the knowledge on bipolar fatigue of bulk material is by far not as advanced as in thin films. The intention of this work is to arrive at a thorough understanding of the underlying physical mechanisms of fatigue and to outline how potential models have to be structured to be meaningful with respect to the microscopic mechanisms. A simple model for defect agglomeration is given based on the experimental findings of the agglomeration mechanism. A comfortable agreement with the experimental results, several of which were unclear so far was obtained without using any fitting parameters.