Young’s modulus and damping of partially sintered potassium sodium niobate (KNN) ceramics and its temperature dependence determined via the impulse excitation technique (IET)

Potassium sodium niobate (KNN) is suitable for the preparation of lead-free piezoelectric ceramics, and thus the elastic properties and damping behavior should be reliably known for practical applications. In this work we compare partially sintered KNN ceramics prepared by uniaxial and conventional sintering from three different KNN powders and show that the impulse excitation technique (IET) is perfectly suited to determine Young’s modulus at room temperature as well as the temperature dependence of Young’s modulus and damping (heating-cooling cycles with maximum temperature 800 °C). Room temperature values of the effective Young’s modulus of partially sintered KNN ceramics are below the predictions for convex pores and above a recently published numerical benchmark relation for concave pores. The phase transition temperatures determined by the IET are 160–190 °C for the low-temperature orthorhombic-tetragonal / tetragonal-orthorhombic transition and 388–412 °C for the high-temperature tetragonal-cubic / cubic-tetragonal transition, with hysteresis 12–25K.