Mechanism of significantly enhanced piezoelectric performance and stability in textured potassium-sodium niobate piezoelectric ceramics

In this study, the piezoelectric coefficient d 33 and planar electromechanical coupling coefficient k p were enhanced 145% and 71%, respectively for the <001>-textured (K 0.5 Na 0.5 ) 0.95 Li 0.05 Nb 0.93 Sb 0.07 O 3 piezoelectric ceramics compared with their randomly oriented counterpart. Significantly enhanced piezoelectric response in textured ceramics is originated from a combined effect of the intrinsic high piezoelectric activity of <001>-oriented grains in the tetragonal-orthorhombic phases, and easy polarization rotation of fine domains. Furthermore, a comparative analysis suggests that <001>-textured ceramics exhibit good thermal stability , benefiting from the weakened depolarization behavior via crystal orientation . The superior fatigue resistance in textured ceramics can be attributed to the reduced clamping effect as low defect density . These results show that high-performance textured ceramics reported in this work will be promising candidates in the field of lead-free piezoelectric materials .