Issue 4, 2018

Giant electrostrain accompanying structural evolution in lead-free NBT-based piezoceramics

Abstract

High-performance (Na0.5Bi0.5)TiO3 (NBT) lead-free incipient ceramics are promising piezoactuator materials, but high driving fields to deliver the large strain limits their practical applications. Herein, we report a giant piezoelectric strain (d33*) of 810 pm V−1 at a low driving field of 4 kV mm−1 in a novel ternary (0.94 − x)(Na0.5Bi0.5)TiO3–0.06Ba(Zr0.05Ti0.95)O3x(Sr0.8Bi0.10.1)TiO2.95 solid solution with x = 0.05 (SBT5). The field of SBT5 critical composition is notably reduced compared with other NBT-based ceramics, while its strain properties are maintained at a high level along with an excellent thermal stability. The dopant induces a randomly distributed local polarization field, which breaks the symmetry of Landau potential curves, boosts the ferroelectric instability and favors a more disordered relaxor structure. The giant strain in the critical composition SBT5 is due to a field-induced reversible relaxor-ferroelectric phase transformation, while the reduced driving field results from two synergistic effects: remanent quasi-ferroelectric order as the seed for the growth of polar domains helps the system skip the nucleation process; the local defects further facilitate the growth of ferroelectric domains. The composition, temperature and electric-field dependence of structural evolutions were systematically elucidated from the micro- and macroscopic view. This study opens up a feasible and effective way for achieving giant electrostrain in lead-free actuator materials.

Graphical abstract: Giant electrostrain accompanying structural evolution in lead-free NBT-based piezoceramics

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
22 Nov 2017
Accepted
19 Dec 2017
First published
19 Dec 2017

J. Mater. Chem. C, 2018,6, 814-822

Giant electrostrain accompanying structural evolution in lead-free NBT-based piezoceramics

X. Liu, S. Xue, F. Li, J. Ma, J. Zhai, B. Shen, F. Wang, X. Zhao and H. Yan, J. Mater. Chem. C, 2018, 6, 814 DOI: 10.1039/C7TC05359B

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