Constitutive Behavior of Nano-particle Ferroelectric Ceramics

Due to the characteristic of the microstructure, nanoparticle ferroelectric ceramics display a considerable different behavior than ordinary ferroelectric ceramics. In this paper a model is proposed from which the constitutive relation of nanoparticle ferroelectric ceramics is deduced. The model is based on the micro structure of the nanoparticles which consist on the ferroelectric phase and a non-ferroelectric matrix phase. The results show that the effective electro-elastic parameters and the constitutive behavior are size dependent. The size effect is most dominant when the grain size is in the range of dozens of nanometers to several nanometers.