Doping engineering in piezocatalysis: Mechanisms, strategies, and perspectives

Piezocatalysis has emerged as a promising strategy for harvesting mechanical energy and driving chemical reactions toward sustainable energy conversion, environmental remediation, and biomedical applications. However, the practical implementation of piezocatalytic systems remains constrained by insufficient piezoelectric polarization, inefficient charge separation, and limited interfacial reaction kinetics. Doping engineering provides an effective atomic-scale approach to overcome these limitations by simultaneously regulating crystal structures, defect chemistry, electronic configurations, and piezoelectric properties. In this review, we establish a comprehensive framework encompassing crystal-structure regulation (lattice distortion, bond-length variation, and symmetry breaking), defect chemistry and carrier behavior (band-structure modulation, defect evolution, carrier concentration, and density-of-states regulation), and piezoelectric properties (polarization regulation and piezoelectric response enhancement) to elucidate the fundamental roles of dopants in piezocatalysis. The applications of doped piezocatalysts in environmental remediation, energy conversion, and biomedical fields are further reviewed. Finally, current challenges and future perspectives are proposed, focusing on rational dopant design, dynamic structure evolution, long-term stability, and scalable applications. This review provides mechanistic insights into doping-enabled piezocatalysis and offers guidance for the development of high-performance piezocatalytic materials for sustainable technologies.