Dr. Sam-yeon Jo, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics, College of Natural Science, supervised by Professor Sang-don Bu, recently received the Yang Song Researcher Award, the highest prize, at the 2022 Spring Meeting of the Korean Ceramic Society.

The Korean Ceramic Society is one of the three major domestic societies representing the materials field. Its conference facilitates the exchange and sharing of knowledge on the development of the domestic materials and parts industries. At this meeting, about 800 research papers were presented, including regular sessions and special symposia, small research group workshops, and the ACERS Korea Chapter Symposium.

The Yang Song Researcher Award received by Dr. Jo is one of the 'Yang Song Awards' funded by an endowment donated by Chairman Nam Gi-dong (Yang Song), who has served as president of the Ceramic Society. It is awarded to one top postdoctoral researcher who has achieved outstanding research results in the ceramics field.

At the conference, Dr. Jo presented his research titled "Fabrication of Wearable Energy Harvesters Using the Giant Strain Behavior of BNT-Based Relaxor Ferroelectric Ceramics," which received favorable reviews.

The study concerns wearable piezoelectric generators that exploit phase transitions induced by external tensile stress in ergodic-state relaxor ferroelectric materials—materials that have been generally overlooked for piezoelectric generator applications due to relatively low piezoelectric coefficients—and the resulting structural deformation and induced polarization.

The presented research proposes a new driving mechanism for piezoelectric generators that harvest energy from human motion, a topic that has recently attracted considerable attention in the energy-harvesting field. It is regarded as research that can make a significant contribution to improving the performance of wearable piezoelectric generators.