Self-Recovery and Re-Degradation Phenomena for PZT Ceramic

Abstract

Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramic as a kind of widely used piezoelectric material is developing very fast for these years because of its high piezoelectric properties. Therefore, various theories have been developed for describing the mechanism of the degradation process of the PZT ceramic [1-4]. However, there are still many contentions in these reported theories. In this paper, experiments on commercially available lead zirconate titanate (PZT) ceramic samples have been designed. Through this work, it has been found that the leakage current is increasing with the electrical degradation process of the PZT ceramic. Self-recovery and re-degradation phenomena and formation of black spots have also been observed. It has suggested that the duration of the re-degradation process depends on the duration of the self-recovery and the re-degradation process would not produce any black spots and the black spots are only formed during electrical degradation process.