Advanced Manufacturing of Piezoelectric Textured Ceramic Materials

Textured piezoceramics’ recent expanded commercial availability in wide range of size, quantity, and form factor as well as the successful demonstrations poised to ignite strong further interest in their integration into undersea acoustic systems as to significantly improve operational capabilities.  As is now known, textured ceramic materials have electromechanical properties between those of conventional PZT and relaxor PMN-PT single crystals with large advantages over both.  Textured piezoceramics show ability to increase source level and improve sensitivity; their larger bandwidth relative to PZT for a specific design and form factor opens new design space for acoustic systems as it can enhance both the probability of target detection (i.e., ability to detect quieter enemy submarines), enable longer operational life of power source limited systems (i.e., expendable sensors), and extend target detection ranges in physical volume limited applications by enabling lower frequency transducer designs in a smaller form factor. Because of the combined gains in key metrics, Textured ceramics emerge as an alternative transduction material filling the gap between legacy PZT and Single Crystal. Despite the growing interest and successful demonstrations, there remain key obstacles towards a widescale market acceptance in terms of production capacity, yield, and comparable purchase costs to legacy PZT materials. These limitations represent a critical risk to transition into major high volume Navy applications, specifically in expendable systems where transduction materials are required to be high volume manufacturable without shape and size limitation with high yield and at comparable costs and consistency to PZT equivalents. The identified manufacturing issues are rooted in non-standard textured piezoceramic specific processing steps (i.e., template, slurry, wet forming, and BBO) that are not part of a PZT production causing yield issues. This program will focus on addressing these yield, throughput and cost issues as to enable textured piezoceramic parts approach the baseline cost and availability of standard piezoceramic parts in use by US Navy.