Fabrication of Piezoelectric Structures with High Porosity by Digital Light Processing

Digital light processing is a recently developed solution to fabricate complex structured piezoelectric devices. To obtain a high-performance device, the slurry configuration, model slicing, and heat treatment methods during the printing should be carefully determined. In this article, 200 nm particle size barium titanate powders with an optimized solid content of 80% (mass fraction) were used to configure the slurry with higher printing efficiency. The slicing method with the printing direction perpendicular to the poling direction demonstrated higher piezoelectric performance. In addition, piezoelectric parts have a higher piezoelectric response and less deformation after sintering at 1450°C. After finding the above three important optimization parameters, a piezoelectric structure with high porosity was fabricated as an example to show that printed parts of 70% porosity still can keep a high piezoelectric response.