Enhanced piezoelectric properties and phase transition in PZT ceramics induced by Li+-Sm3+ionic pairs

For decades, improving the piezoelectric properties of piezoelectric materials is one of the key research directions. In this paper, a novel co-doping acceptor-donor (Li+-Sm3+) method is proposed to enhance the piezoelectric properties of PbZr0.52Ti0.48O3 (PZT) ceramics. Compared with our previous works, the difference are that Li+-Al3+ or Li + -La3+ ionic pairs occupy sites along the [001] direction while Li+-Sm3+ tends to replace Pb2+ parallels to the [100] direction. 1.5 mol% Li+-Sm3+ enhances the tetragonality of PZT, the maximum polarization intensity, residual polarization intensity and relative coercive field are enhanced. Li+-Sm3+ (1.5 mol %) enhanced the d33 of PZT from 150 to 405 pC/N, the field to strain exceeds 0.16%. The results show that the piezoelectric enhancement mechanism of PZT is mainly due to the tetragonal increase of PZT crystal, the larger spontaneous polarization intensity significantly improves the piezoelectric properties. This work presents a new method to enhances the piezoelectric properties of piezoelectric ceramics.