Study on the Automatic Identification of ABX3 Perovskite Crystal Structure Based on the Bond-Valence Vector Sum

Materials (Basel). 2022 Dec 29;16(1):334. doi: 10.3390/ma16010334.

Abstract

Perovskite materials have a variety of crystal structures, and the properties of crystalline materials are greatly influenced by geometric information such as the space group, crystal system, and lattice constant. It used to be mostly obtained using calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) and experimental data from X-ray diffraction (XRD) curve fitting. These two techniques cannot be utilized to identify materials on a wide scale in businesses since they require expensive equipment and take a lot of time. Machine learning (ML), which is based on big data statistics and nonlinear modeling, has advanced significantly in recent years and is now capable of swiftly and reliably predicting the structures of materials with known chemical ratios based on a few key material-specific factors. A dataset encompassing 1647 perovskite compounds in seven crystal systems was obtained from the Materials Project database for this study, which used the ABX3 perovskite system as its research object. A descriptor called the bond-valence vector sum (BVVS) is presented to describe the intricate geometry of perovskites in addition to information on the usual chemical composition of the elements. Additionally, a model for the automatic identification of perovskite structures was built through a comparison of various ML techniques. It is possible to identify the space group and crystal system using just a small dataset of 10 feature descriptors. The highest accuracy is 0.955 and 0.974, and the highest correlation coefficient (R2) value of the lattice constant can reach 0.887, making this a quick and efficient method for determining the crystal structure.

Keywords: crystal system; feature descriptor; lattice constant; machine learning; space group; the bond-valence vector sum.

Grants and funding

This research received no external funding.