Structural origin of fracture-induced surface charges in piezoelectric pharmaceutical crystals for engineering bulk properties

Kaustav Das, Ishita Ghosh, Soumalya Chakraborty, Amritha G. Nambiar, Sourav Maji, Sumanta K. Karan, Dinesh Kumar, Arvind K. Bansal and C. Malla Reddy ()
Additional contact information
Kaustav Das: Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata
Ishita Ghosh: Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata
Soumalya Chakraborty: National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research
Amritha G. Nambiar: Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)
Sourav Maji: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad
Sumanta K. Karan: The Pennsylvania State University
Dinesh Kumar: Indian Institute of Technology (BHU)
Arvind K. Bansal: National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education and Research
C. Malla Reddy: Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-11

Abstract: Abstract Altering surface chemistry of functional materials is an attractive route to enable large property enhancements without sacrificing overall structural-order, appealing to diverse fields of application sciences; however, the same remains unexplored for organic crystalline materials. Herein, piezoelectricity in pharmaceutical crystals is reported to show colossal surface charges driven by mechanical fracture — where a collection of dipoles arranged in polar head-to-tail fashion generates opposite surface charges on freshly fractured faces — causing them to actuate large distances over 75 µm in milliseconds. Kelvin probe force microscopy is leveraged to show many-fold surface potential enhancement in fractured surfaces relative to the pristine crystals. Further, complementarity of the surface potentials in a pair of fractured crystal shards and asymptotic decay behaviour with time are observed. Newly formed surfaces of the pharmaceutical crystals show long-lasting charges despite their relatively lower piezo-response confirmed by bulk piezometry. To establish the generality of surface phenomena, statistical analyses (≈50 samples) of post-fracture-attraction behaviour of crystals are performed. Finally, the application of fracture-driven surface charges in industrial processes is achieved by investigating flow-property and tablet-strength of bulk pharmaceutical materials. This multiscale approach unveils the symmetry-dependency of surface charges in fractured materials, and probes the same for utilisation in bulk-property engineering.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58138-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:16:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-025-58138-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58138-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().