Applications for Piezoelectric Ceramics

Applications for piezoelectric ceramics utilize one of the two piezoelectric effects  

Direct effect—a voltage is produced by means of a compressive stress. 

Inverse effect—an applied produces small movements. In an alternating field the piezoelectric will vibrate. 

The first commercial piezoelectric BaTiOs devices were phonograph pickups marketed by Sonotome Corporation in the mid-1940s. These used a so-called bimorph design in which an electrode layer separated two strips of the piezoelectric material. Bimorphs are no longer used for this application because they do not produce a high enough quality sound reproduction and most people use CDs now. 

Actuators are an important and growing market for piezoelectric ceramics. In applications requiring precise 

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Thin sheets of piezoelectric materials are used in sensors, buzzers, and actuators. In addition to the conventional vibrators, pressure and acceleration sensors are now also being manufactured from these materials. Lead zirconate titanate (PZT) is one of the most common materials used for these applications. The trend is to produce thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller parts. Therefore tape casting has become the manufacturing route of choice. One of the basic applications of piezoelectric ceramics is as a gas igniter where a spark is generated by the piezoelectric under an applied mechanical stress. Microphone discs are also prepared from thin... 

A number of works are devoted to the electrochemical preparation of ZnO, which may have application in photocatalysis, ceramics, piezoelectric transducers, chemical sensors, photovoltaics, and others. ZnO has the same band-gap energy as Ti02, and the oxygenation capacities for both compounds should be similar. Ya-maguchi et al. [155] prepared photoactive zinc oxide films by anodizing a zinc plate. Such films could decompose gaseous acetaldehyde with the aid of black lights. 

Foams have a large variety of applications. Solid foams are widely used as insulating materials. Due to the presence of air bubbles they have a low thermal conductivity. Polyurethane foams and Styrofoam are examples. Styrofoam is also used as a packing material. The light weight of polymer foams makes them attractive as filling materials to stabilize otherwise hollow structures. A natural solid foam is pumice stone. Metal foams are used in the automotive and aerospace industry as light and stable materials [567], Ceramic foams are developed for electronic applications as piezoelectric transducers and low dielectric constant substrates [568],... 

The first piezoceramic to be developed commercially was BaTi03, the model ferroelectric discussed earlier (see Section 2.7.3). By the 1950s the solid solution system Pb(Ti,Zr)03 (PZT), which also has the perovskite structure, was found to be ferroelectric and PZT compositions are now the most widely exploited of all piezoelectric ceramics. The following outline description of their properties and fabrication introduces important ideas for the following discussion of the tailoring of piezoceramics, including PZT, for specific applications. It is assumed that the reader has studied Sections 2.3 and 2.7.3. 

Electrostrictive materials offer important advantages over piezoelectric ceramics in actuator applications. They do not contain domains (of the usual ferroelectric type), and so return to their original dimensions immediately a field is reduced to zero, and they do not age. Figure 6.24(a) shows the strain-electric field characteristic for a PLZT (7/62/38) piezoelectric and Fig. 6.24(b) the absence of significant hysteresis in a PMN (0.9Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/303-0.1 PbTi03) electrostrictive ceramic. 

Composite piezoelectric transducers made from poled Pb-Ti-Zr (PZT) ceramics and epoxy polymers form an interesting family of materials which highlight the advantages of composite structures in improving coupled properties in soilds for transduction applications A number of different connection patterns have been fabricated with the piezoelectric ceramic in the form of spheres, fibers, layered, or three-dimensional skeletons Adding a polymer phase lowers the density, the dielectric constant, and the mechanical stiffness of the composite, thereby altering electric field and concentrating mechanical stresses on the piezoelectric ceramic phase. 

While PVDF has piezoelectric properties similar to those of piezoelectric ceramic materials, the pyroelectric coefficient is too low to be useful except for specialized applications where the main... 

Piezoelectric ceramics and polymers can play the double role of sensors and actuators these materials can either generate an electric field under an applied load or change dimensions when subjected to a voltage difference. When fabrication problems associated with their embedding are solved, they will find wide application for structure vibration control. 

Piezoelectricity links the fields of electricity and acoustics. Piezoelectric materials are key components in acoustic transducers such as microphones, loudspeakers, transmitters, burglar alarms and submarine detectors. The Curie brothers [7] in 1880 first observed the phenomenon in quartz crystals. Langevin [8] in 1916 first reported the application of piezoelectrics to acoustics. He used piezoelectric quartz crystals in an ultrasonic sending and detection system - a forerunner to present day sonar systems. Subsequently, other materials with piezoelectric properties were discovered. These included the crystal Rochelle salt [9], the ceramics lead barium titanate/zirconate (pzt) and barium titanate [10] and the polymer poly(vinylidene fluoride) [11]. Other polymers such as nylon 11 [12], poly(vinyl chloride) [13] and poly (vinyl fluoride) [14] exhibit piezoelectric behavior, but to a much smaller extent. Strain constants characterize the piezoelectric response. These relate a vector quantity, the electrical field, to a tensor quantity, the mechanical stress (or strain). In this convention, the film orientation direction is denoted by 1, the width by 2 and the thickness by 3. Thus, the piezoelectric strain constant dl3 refers to a polymer film held in the orientation direction with the electrical field applied parallel to the thickness or 3 direction. The requirements for observing piezoelectricity in materials are a non-symmetric unit cell and a net dipole movement in the structure. There are 32-point groups, but only 30 of these have non-symmetric unit cells and are therefore capable of exhibiting piezoelectricity. Further, only 10 out of these twenty point groups exhibit both piezoelectricity and pyroelectricity. The piezoelectric strain constant, d, is related to the piezoelectric stress coefficient, g, by... 

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