Behavior of the main propeties of hard and soft type piezoceramics with temperature from 2 to 600 K

The application area of piezoceramic materials and devices based on such materials is continuously extended. The working conditions for such devices and structures may be sometimes very hard such as low and high temperatures, nuclear radiation, high pressure and so on. Such conditions may affect to some extent the transducer performances due to the changes of the basic properties of piezoceramic materials used as sensors. In this regard we have investigated the changes of the main piezoelectric properties of two typically hard and soft piezoceramics within a large temperature range from 2 to 600 K. All parameters measured showed a rather steady increase or decrease with increasing temperature. The results were discussed in terms of intrinsic and domain wall contribution to the dielectric and piezoelectric response of materials.