Advances in Processing of Bulk Ferroelectric Materials

The development of ferroelectric bulk materials is still under extensive investigation, as new and challenging issues are growing in relation to their widespread applications. Progress in understanding the fundamental aspects requires adequate technological tools. This would enable controlling and tuning the material properties as well as fully exploiting them into the scale production. Apart from the growing number of new compositions, interest in the first ferroelectrics like BaTiO3 or PZT materials is far from dropping. The need to find new lead-free materials, with as high performance as PZT ceramics, is pushing towards a full exploitation of barium-based compositions. However, lead-based materials remain the best performing at reasonably low production costs. Therefore, the main trends are towards nano-size effects and miniaturisation, multifunctional materials, integration, and enhancement of the processing ability in powder synthesis. Also, in control of dispersion and packing, to let densification occur in milder conditions. In this chapter, after a general review of the composition and main properties of the principal ferroelectric materials, methods of synthesis are analysed with emphasis on recent results from chemical routes and cold consolidation methods based on the colloidal processing