Doped Barium Titanate: phase transformation and cold sintering process
SIDDIQUI M. 1, BAI Y. 2, SALAMON D. 1
1 Central European Institute of Technology, Brno University of Technology, Brno, Czechia; 2 Microelectronics Research Unit, Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, UniversityofOulu, Oulu, Finland
This work investigates the phase transformation and grain morphology of cold-sintered doped Barium titanate (BaTiO3). BaTiO3 is an electroceramic with high dielectric permittivity and low losses. It is often doped to modify the desired properties such as relative permittivity and positive temperature resistivity and stability of the relative permittivity. BaTiO3 required a high sintering temperature range from 1300 to 1400 °C for effective consolidation. Currently, researchers adopt low-temperature synthesis methodologies to reduce high energy consumption. The drawback of low-temperature synthesis, the material suffers the low densification and the formation of BaCO3, which can be overcome by further heat annealing at 700 to 900 °C. The post-annealing also influenced the phase transformation from pseudo-cubic to tetragonal or vice versa. Thus, the effect of post-annealing conditions on the phase transformation of BaTiO3 densified by the cold sintering process is studied. The Sr(OH)2.8H2O was added as a dopant in BaTiO3 and fabricated at 225 °C/1 hr, the pressure of 250 MPa was kept constant throughout the heating cycle. Then sintered samples were annealed at a temperature range of 500 to 1100 °C, after each heating cycle, the samples were analyzed by XRD and SEM. To investigate the post-annealing's influence on cold sintered samples, the aforementioned experimental conditions were adopted to sintered uniaxially pressed and pressure-less sintered samples at 225 °C. During the investigation, it was found that cold sintering the Sr2+ ion impacted the post-annealed sample's phase composition and phase transformation.
Keywords: Barium titanate, Phase transformation, Dopant, Post-annealing, Cold sintering process