Fatigue Degradation and Reliability of Piezoelectric Ceramics

Reliability-based consideration of the fatigue degradation of piezoelectric ceramics has been performed in the present work. The material used for this work is a commercial piezoelectric ceramics with the composition of PbZrO3-PbTiO3 (PZT) including the third component Experimental studies were performed on the changes of mechanical and electrical properties of this material under repeated compression fatigue loading. In addition, a statistical residual strength degradation model was devised for this material and the validity of the proposed model was examined by comparison with a sufficient amount of test data. Good agreement has been observed between the experimental results and the theoretical prediction on the residual strength degradation.