Influence of microwave sintering on electrical properties of BCTZ lead free piezoelectric ceramics

Kelly Orlik (1) , Yannick Lorgouilloux (1) , Pascal Marchet (2) , Anthony Thuault (3, 1) , Mohamed Rguiti (1) , Christian Courtois (1) , Florian Jean (4, 1)

1 LMCPA - Laboratoire des Matériaux Céramiques et Procédés Associés - EA 2443
2 IRCER-AXE3 - IRCER - Axe 3 : organisation structurale multiéchelle des matériaux
3 CRISMAT - Laboratoire de cristallographie et sciences des matériaux
4 IRCER - Institut de Recherche sur les CERamiques

Barium titanate doped with calcium and zirconium (BCTZ) could be used at low temperature to replace lead based piezoelectric ceramics (PZT). The classical way to obtain BCTZ is the solid-state route coupled with conventional sintering, but this step is time-consuming. To reduce the duration of this process, microwave heating was used for sintering. It is a fast sintering method and the heating rate was around 200 °C/min in this study. Slightly better electrical properties with finer microstructures (d33* = 706 pm/V, grain size about 42.1 ± 14.2 μm) were obtained for samples sintered by microwave heating during 50 min compared to the conventional sintering (d33* = 622 pm/V, 22.6 ± 4.4 μm). The main result of this study is that by using microwave heating, the sintering step duration (including heating, dwell time and cooling) was drastically reduced: 1.5 h for microwave sintering against 12.5 h for conventional sintering.

Mots clés: Lead-free piezoceramics; BCTZ; Ferroelectric properties; Piezoelectric properties; Microwave sintering

Domaines: Chimie; Matériaux; Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]; Matériaux

Kelly Orlik, Yannick Lorgouilloux, Pascal Marchet, Anthony Thuault, Mohamed Rguiti, et al.. Influence of microwave sintering on electrical properties of BCTZ lead free piezoelectric ceramics. Journal of the European Ceramic Society, 2020, 40 (4), pp.1212-1216. ⟨10.1016/j.jeurceramsoc.2019.12.010⟩. ⟨hal-02550924⟩