New Development of High Performance Piezoelectric Materials by Nanodomain Engineering

Abstract

To develop high performance piezoelectric materials, a new method called at "nanodomain engineering" was proposed and investigated in this study. The nanodomain engineering means a method, which can produce high density nanodomain configurations by control of chemical composition, i.e., to develop an intermediate state between relaxor ferroelectrics and normal ferroelectrics. To confirm the concept, ternary system ceramics of BaTiO3-Bi(Mg1/2Ti1/2)O3-BiFeO3(BT-BMT-BF) was prepared and characterized. As the results, a formation of nanodomain configurations was confirmed by a transmission electron microscopy. Moreover, for the ceramics with the nanodomain configurations, high apparent piezoelectric constants over 500 pC/N was clearly obtained, which suggested that the concept of "nanodomain engineering" might work good.