PLZT Ceramics for Optical Sensor and Actuator Devices

Characterization of PLZT Ceramics for Optical Sensor and Actuator Devices 

Ribal Georges Sabat Royal Military College of Canada Canada 

In this chapter, I will conduct a review on some of the fundamental material properties of relaxor ferroelectric PLZT ceramics, which include the dielectric, ferroelectric, electromechanical, electro-optical and thermo-optical behaviours. Further details on each section can be found in the references (Levesque and Sabat 2011 Sabat, Rochon, and Mukherjee 2008 Sabat and Rochon 2009b Sabat and Rochon 2009c Sabat and Rochon 2009a). 

The temperature and frequency dependence of the dielectric properties of any ferroelectric material are essential features to study, since they provide insight to possible transducer 

According to the dielectric results in the previous section, decreasing the temperature at which these measurements were taken should increase the hysteresis gap (ferroelectric behaviour), and increasing the temperature should further decrease the hysteresis. This was observed by Carl et al. (Carl and Geisen 1973) for PLZT (9.0/65/35). The slim ferroelectric behaviour of these PLZT compositions makes them ideal for use as ptrecision sensors and actuators, since they have almost no remnant polarization when the field is removed. Hence, the risk of depoling is eliminated in this case. 

---