Performance enhancement of Pb(In1/2Nb1/2)O3-PbTiO3 ferroelectric single crystals using pulse poling

The regular domain structure is beneficial to the enhancement of piezoelectric properties of relaxor-PbTiO3 ferroelectric crystals after alternating current poling (ACP). However, one shortcoming of ACP is that there are some non-rotational domains. Another is that ACP has no effect on polar axis-oriented crystals. Therefore, ACP is not very satisfactory for the morphotropic phase boundary (MPB) composition. Here, we demonstrate a pulse poling (PP) method that can lead to substantially increase the piezoelectric coefficient d33 of MPB region Pb(In1/2Nb1/2)O3-PbTiO3 (PIN-PT) single crystals. The d33 and free dielectric permittivity εT33/ε0 of ACP [001]c-oriented 0.65PIN-0.35PT single crystals are 1490 pC/N and 3360, which are smaller than DCP sample (1640 pC/N and 3620). The d33 and εT33/ε0 after PP method are 2400 pC/N and 5390, having 61% and 60% improvement compared with ACP method. This work presents a new domain engineering method for achieving high piezoelectricity of these MPB region ferroelectric crystals. A new poling method called pulse poling was proposed for improving the piezoelectric properties of MPB region relaxor-PT single crystals. The d33 and εT33/ε0 of 0.65PIN-0.35PT single crystals after PP method are 2400 pC/N and 5390, having 61%, 60% and 46% and 49% higher than that of ACP and DCP samples [Display omitted] .