Ferroic materials including ferroelastic and ferroelectric materials have many important applications as functional materials. Our interest for ferroic materials started some years back with the discovery of ferroelastic properties in LaCoO₃-based materials. Ferroelastic materials have hysteresis behaviour in mechanical stress - strain relationship due to domain reorientation. Due to the ferroelastic properties the materials shows non-elastic permanent deformation at ambient temperature. We have been investigating the mechanism for the domain reorientation for these types of materials by several different techniques and have been studying the effect of the ferroelastic properties and the mechanical properties of the materials. Recently we have expanded our activity to include ferroelectric materials where we are investigating wet chemistry based methods for the preparation of nanostructured PbTiO₃ materials including nanorods, microspheres and bur-like structures with nanorods growing out of microspheres. We are also developing methods for the chemical solution deposition of thin films of different ferroic materials. Lead-free ferroelectric materials as well as multiferroic materials have gained quite at lot of interest recently and is an steady increasing part of our research activities.

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