Electrophoresis-assisted fabrication of pseudo 1-3 ceramic/polymer piezoelectric composites

Abstract

The 1-3 ceramic/polymer piezoelectric composites have greater dielectric, piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties than 0-3 composites. In this paper, electrophoresis is introduced into the fabrication procedure of traditional 0-3 ceramic/polymer piezoelectric composite to move and pearl-serially align the piezoelectric particles in the polymer matrix, which is called pseudo 1-3 composite. In this work, the PZT/epoxy pseudo 1-3 piezoelectric is fabricated via using a 500 V/mm, 4 kHz AC electric field to form the electrophoresis phenomenon during the curing procedure. Compared with the traditional 0-3 piezoelectric composites, the pseudo 1-3 piezoelectric composites behave as the significantly-enhanced dielectric, piezoelectric and ferroelectric performances on basis of our theoretical analysis and experimental measurement result. Electrophoresis–assisted fabricating pseudo 1-3 piezoelectric composite possesses the advantages of simple operation, low cost and significant performance improvement, which make it hopeful to be used to prepare high-performance ceramic/polymer piezoelectric composites for practical application.