Effect of Rare Earth Gadolinium Substitution on the Structural, Microstructure and Dielectric Properties of Lead Free BNT Ceramics

Piezoelectric materials have wide applications in today’s advanced technologies. However, most commercially used piezoelectric material PZT (PbZr1-xTixO3) is now strictly restricted worldwide due to hazardous nature of Pb. Research for the development of new lead free materials with properties comparable to that of PZT is in progress in recent years. In the present work, an effort has been made to synthesize low amount of rare earth gadolinium modified (Bi1-xGdx)0.5Na0.5TiO3 (BGNT) with compositions (x) = 0, 0.02, 0.03 and 0.04 by a novel Semi–Wet Technique. The structural, microstructure, phase transition and dielectric properties have been investigated. The XRD patterns have shown single phase formation for all the samples with a rhombohedral symmetry at RT. Gd3+ doping has shown a significant effect on the grain growth. The dielectric measurement has been carried out over the temperature range from RT to 400 oC at 1, 10 and 100 kHz frequency. It has been observed from the εr vs T plots that two phase transitions (i) ferroelectric to anti-ferroelectric and (ii) anti ferroelectric to paraelectric occur in all the samples. The composition with x = 0.02 has shown significantly high value of dielectric constant (εr ~ 1567) and low value of dielectric loss (Tan δ ~ 0.043) at room temperature.