A comparative consideration of the link between poling procedure, induced damage, and piezoelectric response in perovskite ferroelectrics

There has been much interest in recent years in improving Direct Current Poling (DCP) for piezoelectric materials. Some of the more promising substitutes include Alternating Current Poling (ACP), Water Quench Poling (WQP), and ACP with Field Cooling (ACP-FC). This paper summarizes the merits of these poling strategies and compares them to pulse poling. The results show that pulse poling outpaces both DCP and ACP in terms of the magnitude of piezoelectric response across a range of materials. Hard and soft piezoelectric samples in both single crystal and textured form were poled using all these techniques. For the single crystal samples (with compositions of Mn: Pb(In1/2Nb1/2)O3–Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3–PbTiO3 (PIN–PMN–PT) and Sm: PIN–PMN–PT), pulse poling generated the greatest increase in d33 and keff relative to DCP, with both piezoelectrics seeing increases above 65%. In the case of the {001} textured Mn: PMN–PZT–PT material, pulse poling and ACP-FC reduced the loss of the system and improved its mechanical quality factor (Qm) by 20% and 4%, respectively. These phenomena were further investigated via Rayleigh analysis to quantify each poling strategy’s impact on domain wall dynamics. The textured ceramic samples showed lower overall values of α (which is related to the mobility and concentration of domain walls) when compared to the single crystals. It was found that α decreased for the unconventionally poled textured samples relative to DCP, whereas the single crystals’ α values increased. Samples that underwent WQP experienced significant microcracking, limiting possible applications.