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Humidity-assisted scalable production of colossal crack-free ceramics for electromechanical applications
Journal of Advanced Ceramics 2025, 14(9): 9221142
Published: 05 August 2025
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Electromechanical ceramics, owing to their large electrostrain and low hysteresis, have emerged as promising approaches for advancing high-precision transducer applications. Although tremendous efforts have been made to synthesize colossal, crack-free ceramics, this remains a key challenge. To address this issue, we developed a facile, time-efficient, and humidity-assisted method to synthesize a series of lead-free ceramics, including BaTiO3, (Ba,Sr)TiO3, Ba(Zr,Ti)O3, (Bi,Na)TiO3, and (K,Na)NbO3. Their microstructures, as well as their dielectric and ferroelectric properties, were subsequently investigated. Our analysis revealed that humidity not only lowers the drying temperature to as low as 20 °C but also significantly reduces the processing time, allowing for the fabrication of monolithic ceramics as large as 10 cm × 10 cm. Additionally, a tunable dielectric constant ranging from 489.3 to 4215.7 can be achieved simply by adjusting the porosity. Moreover, these electromechanical ceramics exhibit excellent electrostrictive performance under an AC bias, with a strain of ~0.46%, corresponding to an electrostrictive coefficient of 125 nm2∙V−2. Our work offers a scalable and cost-effective strategy to achieve wafer-scale crack-free ceramics, thereby providing a new opportunity for the development of actuators, sensors, motors, and transducers.

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