Textured piezoelectric ceramics with reduced grain size for high-frequency transducer applications.
basic_science · Level V
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- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 41807413.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-026-70360-z.
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Abstract
Textured piezoelectric ceramics are considered promising next-generation piezoelectric materials, offering single-crystal-like high piezoelectric performance and low production cost. However, the large grain size of textured ceramics (15 ~ 40 μm) lead to significant decrease in piezoelectricity as the thickness of samples approaches the scale of grain size, limiting their application in high-frequency transducers (>20 MHz, corresponding thickness <100 μm). Here, we address this issue by reducing the grain size through template shortening. A modified topochemical microcrystal conversion method was developed to fabricate BaTiO<sub>3</sub> templates with a much smaller length of 2.7 μm, compared with conventional templates (>7 μm). Using these reduced-size developed templates, we obtained <001 > -textured Pb(Mg<sub>1/3</sub>Nb<sub>2/3</sub>)O<sub>3</sub>-PbTiO<sub>3</sub> ceramic with an average grain size of 7.8 μm, being significantly smaller than previously reported textured Pb(Mg<sub>1/3</sub>Nb<sub>2/3</sub>)O<sub>3</sub>-PbTiO<sub>3</sub> ceramics (~20 μm), while achieving a high piezoelectric coefficient d<sub>33</sub> of 1330 pC N<sup>-1</sup>. Notably, the adverse thickness scaling effect on piezoelectric performance was greatly mitigated: at a thickness of 100 μm, the piezoelectric response was found to reduce only 8% for our textured ceramics with reduced grain size, compared with almost 30% in conventional-grain-size textured ceramics. This strategy provides a practical route to high-performance textured ceramics suited for next-generation high-frequency ultrasonic transducers.