Design and fabrication of highly thermally conductive 1-1-3 piezoelectric composites

1-3 piezoelectric composites have been widely used in transmitting transducers, medical devices, navigation, aerospace, etc. However, due to poor thermal conduction of inside piezoelectric composites, performance degradation and service life shortening of transmitting transducers are easily caused while working under high-power or continuously operated states. In this paper, a solution is provided by designing and creating highly efficient thermally conductive paths in 1-1-3 piezoelectric composite. This novel design resulted in two-fold increase in heat dissipation rate compared with traditional 1-3 piezoelectric composites, while maintaining high piezoelectric properties. Furthermore, we designed and fabricated an efficient heat dissipation transducer (EHDT) with the novel 1-1-3 piezoelectric composite as the core material, which can relief heat accumulation effectively compared with conventional transducers (CT). The EHDT can achieve three times more power output than the CT at the same temperature threshold of 90 °C.