High temperature stability and mechanical quality factor of donor-acceptor co-doped BaTiO3 piezoelectrics

Low temperature stability has limited the applications at elevated temperature for ABO 3 -type lead-free ceramics. And multi-grade resonances of piezoelectric ceramics are hardly obtained although the resonances are very important in some applications such as filter and resonator . High piezoelectric properties and large mechanical quality factors with multi-grade resonances can be obtained in (Li + -La 3+ ) co-doped BaTiO 3 ceramics, and excellent temperature stabilities are achieved in the ceramics. It has been shown that the thermal treatments both with and without electric field at 200 °C improve the piezoelectric properties and thermal stability further. Large piezoelectric constant (272 pC N 1 ) and huge mechanical quality factor (2010) was obtained after thermal-electrical treatment, which is caused by Li + -La 3+ ionic pair aligning along the external electric filed during thermal-electrical treatment. Moreover, the present study provides an effective method to design combination properties with high temperature stability for ABO 3 perovskite ferroelectric ceramics .