Ultra-broad temperature insensitive ceramics with large piezoelectricity by morphotropic phase boundary design

Abstract

Improving the operating characteristics of piezoelectric devices in high temperature environments urgently requires the development of piezoceramics with both high piezoelectric coefficient and excellent temperature stability. However, it is difficult for existing piezoceramics to take care of both at the same time. Generally, high piezoelectricity can be obtained at morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) in the binary systems, such as PbZrO3–PbTiO3 and Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3–PbTiO3, but the temperature stability is unsatisfactory, which seriously restricts the practical application. Here, an optimum composition having excellent comprehensive properties is constructed by designing multiple MPBs in the novel xPb(In1/2Nb1/2)O3-yBiScO3–zPbTiO3 ternary system. When x = 0.04, y = 0.345 and z = 0.615, the specimen has a high piezoelectric coefficient d33 of 478 pC/N at 200 °C, meanwhile, the fluctuation of d33 is less than ± 10% over an ultra-broad temperature range of 50–350 °C. Combined with a variety of in situ analysis techniques, it can be determined that the temperature-insensitive high piezoelectric coefficient is related to the multiple MPBs design, which is beneficial to the optimization of the hierarchical domain configuration. The developed phase boundary design strategy paves a new way to building next generation high performance high temperature piezoceramics.