Bipolar cycling effects in BiFeO3–BaTiO3 piezoelectric ceramics

BiFeO3–BaTiO3 (BF-BT) lead-free piezoelectric system has been paid much attention due to good piezoelectric properties and high Curie temperature. Poling is a process to align ferroelectric domains and increase the piezoelectric coefficients. During the poling process, unipolar direct current (dc) electric fields were applied conventionally, but recently bipolar alternating current (ac) cycling was reported to improve piezoelectric properties in rhombohedral structure piezoelectric materials. We investigated the effects of dc-poling and ac-cycling in BF-BT ceramics. The d33 increased from 210 pC/N with dc-poling to 240 pC/N with ac-cycling in the morphotropic phase boundary region of BF-BT with domain engineering. This improvement of piezoelectric properties with ac-cycling was consistent with the structural evolution related to ferroelectric domains.