Highly enhanced sinterability of commercial PZT powders by high-energy ball milling

High-energy ball milling technique was successfully applied to a commercial lead zirconate titanate (PZT) powder to decrease its sintering temperature by 100 °C. The sinterability enhancement of commercial PZT powder through this technique was evidenced by experimental results. The commercial PZT powder is made up of ball-shaped particles of tens of micrometers in size, consisting of <1-μm grains. After ball milling for 10 h, the large particles were totally broken down and the grain size was reduced by two orders of magnitude. The milled PZT powder achieves its maximum sintering rate at about 800 °C, while the sintering rate peak for unmilled powder is about 1150 °C. Almost fully dense PZT ceramics, which show good dielectric and ferroelectric properties, can be achieved by sintering the milled powder at temperature as low as 950 °C. On the other hand, the unmilled powder still exhibits porous structure after being sintered at 1000 °C and shows very high dielectric loss and loose P-E hysteresis loop. It can be concluded that high-energy ball milling is an effective technique to improve the sinterability of commercially available PZT powders and may be also applied to other materials.