Plate-like Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 particles synthesized by topochemical microcrystal conversion method

In this work, plate-like Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 (NBT) particles were successfully synthesized from a bismuth layer-structured ferroelectric Na0.5Bi4.5Ti4O15 (NBT4) precursor by a topochemical microcrystal conversion (TMC) method. Because of the high anisotropic structure, plate-like NBT4 particles were first synthesized by molten salt process. After topochemical reaction with the complementary reactants (Na2CO3) and TiO2 at 950 °C for 4 h in NaCl flux, the layer structure of the NBT4 particles was transformed into a simple perovskite NBT template. The resulting large NBT templates had plate-like shape, an average size of 10–15 μm and retained the morphological features of the NBT4 precursor. The large as synthesized plate-like NBT particles were utilized to fabricate textured 99.40 Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3-0.60BaZrO3 (NBT-BZ) ceramics via the templated grain growth (TGG) method.