Preparation and characteristics of fine-grained ferroelectric glass-ceramic composites via a modified hybrid route at low temperature sintering

Dense, homogeneous and fully developed fine-grained ferroelectric Pb(Zr0.53Ti0.47)O3-based glass-ceramics have been successfully prepared at a low-sintering temperature of 850-900°C by a modified hybrid process in air. The influence of the PbO-B2O3-SiO2(abbreviated as PBS) glass-gel content on the microstructure, dielectric, and ferroelectric properties of such glass-ceramics has been investigated. The temperature dependence of the dielectric constant indicated that the fine-grained Pb(Zr0.53Ti0.47)O3(abbreviated as PZT(53/47)) based glass-ceramic shows the characteristic dispersion at the Curie point. Ferroelectric hysteresis loop analyses have been performed to manifest the ferroelectric nature of the highly crystallized PZT(53/47) phase prepared by this modified novel hybrid process despite containing higher wt% glass-gel contents. The best dielectric and ferroelectric properties in a typical sample with 5% by weight of glass-gel content were found to have dielectric constant and loss tangent of 920 and 0.02 at 1 kHz, respectively. The saturation polarization (Ps), and remanent polarization (Pr) as well as the coercive field (Ec) are 21.9 μC/cm2, 10.8 μC/cm2and 2.19 kV/mm, respectively.