Music Fighter

In recent years, many research efforts have been focused upon the enhancement of the piezoelectric properties of PZT by incorporating the material in a porous matrix. The basic concept of such designs is to mechanically decouple the lateral strain by reducing the material's Poisson’s ratio. The resultant material, usually in the form of multi-phase composites, will have a lower dielectric constant than PZT. Because the composite design reduces the contributions of d31 and d32, the material win also have a much higher hydrophone figure-of-merit in hydrostatic mode; The pioneering effort by Newnham, Skinner and Cross involved the application of coral skeletons through the replamine process to produce a coral-type structure of PZT. Shrout, Schulze and Biggers later developed a simpler method for fabricating a three-dimensional interconnected PZT-polymer composite.