Relationship between composition and electromechanical properties of CuO-doped textured PYN-PMN-PT ceramics

This study reports the effects of composition and the presence of residual template particles on the electromechanical properties of random and textured CuO-doped Pb(Yb1/2Nb1/2)O3-Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 ceramics. Fully textured PYN-PMN-PT ceramics were produced with [001]-oriented barium titanate (BT) particles. The strain of all textured compositions was improved by 40–82 %, and the coercive field was increased by −1 kV/cm relative to ceramic compositions. Textured 20PYN-46PMN-34PT ceramics had the best combination of properties including a high Ec of 9.8 kV/cm and a low strain hysteresis of 8.5 %. Rayleigh analysis of textured PYN-PMN-PT ceramics showed that more rhombohedral compositions have greater strain because of improved extrinsic and intrinsic contributions to the piezoelectric response. These results demonstrate that textured PYN-PMN-PT is a promising material for high power transducers, however compositions must be sufficiently on the rhombohedral side of the morphotropic phase boundary to compensate for the phase-shifting effects of residual stresses from residual BT template particles.