Processing of porous PZT materials for underwater acoustics

Porous PZT materials are developed for hydrostatic sensing applications, owing to their lowered acoustic impedance that leads to a good acoustic coupling with water and to a high hydrostatic figure of merit. Porous PZT materials with different pore volumes and pore size distributions were obtained by starch consolidation technique. The differnt morphologies, pore volumes and pore size distributions are correlated with the processing parameters and piezoelectric properties and will be discussed in terms of the influence of the peorosity agent properties and reproducibility.