Enhanced electrical properties of textured NBBT ceramics derived from the screen printing technique

(001)
_pc
-oriented (Na
_0.5
Bi
_0.5
)
_0.94
Ba
_0.06
TiO
₃
(NBBT) lead-free piezoelectric ceramics were fabricated by the screen printing technique using Na
_0.5
Bi
_0.5
TiO
₃
(NBT) templates. The plate-like NBT template particles were synthesized from bismuth layer-structured ferroelectric Bi
₄
Ti
₃
O
₁₂
(BiT) precursors by the topochemical method. The screen printed NBBT ceramics with 20 wt% NBT templates contained a large fraction of grains aligned with their c-axis normal to the sample surface, giving a Lotgering factor of 0.486. The dielectric and ferroelectric properties of textured NBBT ceramics were anisotropic. Compared with the non-textured NBBT ceramics, the dielectric, ferroelectric, and piezoelectric properties of the textured NBBT ceramics were improved, giving a dielectric constant ϵ
^T
₃₃
ϵ
₀
T / of 910, a remnant polarization P
_r
of 29.2 μC/cm
²
, a coercive field E
_c
of 23.5 kV/cm, a piezoelectric coefficient d
₃₃
of 180 pC/N, and a thickness-mode electromechanical coupling coefficient k
_t
of 0.485.