Grain-Oriented Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3–BaZrO3 Piezoelectric Ceramics

Abstract

Piezoelectric ceramics have applications in various electronic devices such as sensors, actuators, energy harvesters, and so on. Most of these devices are manufactured from lead-containing materials because of their excellent electromechanical performance and low cost. However, lead-containing materials are considered as serious threat to the environment and facing restrictions from legislative agencies across the globe. Since last decade, much research efforts have been devoted to produce high-performance leadfree ceramics for industrial applications. Among lead-free candidate materials, bismuthbased perovskite ceramics such as sodium bismuth titanate (Bi 0.5 Na 0.5 TiO 3 , BNT) are considered potential substitute for lead-based materials because of the Bi 3+ and Pb +2 same 6s 2 lone pair electronic configuration. This chapter describes the synthesis of BNT particles by different techniques; conventional mixed oxide (CMO) route along with topochemical microcrystal conversion (TMC) methods followed by fabrication of BaZrO 3-modified BNT ceramics with a chemical composition of 0.994Bi 0.5 Na 0.5 TiO 3-0.006BaZrO 3 (BNT-BZ) by a conventional solid-state reaction method, its texture development by reactive templated grain growth method using BNT templates, and comparison of the structural and electromechanical properties of the textured and non-textured counterparts.