Smart materials, which exhibit piezoelectricity, find an eclectic range of applications in the industry. The direct piezoelectric effect has been widely used in sensor design, and the inverse piezoelectric effect has been applied in actuator design. Ever since 1954, PZT and BaTiO 3 were widely used for sensor and actuator applications despite their toxicity, brittleness, inflexibility, etc. With the discovery of PVDF in 1969, followed by development of copolymers, a flexible, easy to process, nontoxic, high density alternate with high piezoelectric voltage coefficient was available. In the past 20 years, heterostructural materials like polymer ceramic composites, have received lot of attention, since these materials combine the excellent pyroelectric and piezoelectric properties of ceramics with the flexibility, processing facility, and strength of the polymers resulting in relatively high dielectric permittivity and breakdown strength, which are not attainable in a single phase piezoelectric material. The current review article is an attempt to provide a compendium of all the work carried out with reference to PVDF-PZT composites. The review article evaluates the effect of grain size, content and other factors under the purview of dielectric and piezoelectric properties while evaluating the sensitivity of the material for sensor application. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 55:1589-1616, 2015

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There are many ways to coat tablets. Coatings are a very important part in the formulation of pharmaceutical dosage form to achieve excellent formulation quality (e.g., color, texture, mouth feel, and taste masking), physical and chemical protection for the drugs in the dosage forms, and modification of drug release characteristics. Most film coatings are applied as aqueous or organic-based polymer solutions. Such film coating brings their own disadvantages. Solventless coatings are alternative technique of coating. Solventless coating technologies can overcome many of the disadvantages associated with the use of solvents (e.g., solvent exposure, solvent disposal, and residual solvent in product) in pharmaceutical coating. Solventless processing reduces the overall cost by eliminating the tedious and expensive processes of solvent disposal/treatment. In addition, it can significantly reduce the processing time due to reduction of step of drying/evaporation. These environment-friendly processes are performed without any heat in most cases (except hot-melt coating) and thus can provide an alternative technology to coat temperature-sensitive drugs. This review includes various solventless coating methods like magnetic assisted impaction coating , hotmelt coating, supercritical fluid spray coating, electrostatic coating, dry powder coating, and photocurable coating that can be used to coat the pharmaceutical dosage forms.