Exceptional piezoelectricity in highly textured BaTiO₃ ceramics by vat photopolymerization

Textured ceramics have received extensive attention for achieving single-crystal-like properties at low cost. Additive manufacturing (AM) has recently emerged as a promising approach for producing textured ceramics. In this work, vat photopolymerization (VPP) based AM is employed to fabricate highly < 001 > -textured, lead-free barium titanate (BaTiO₃) piezoelectric ceramics through shear-induced template alignment during printing, achieving a high texture degree of 97.9% and a relative density of 97.5%. Compared with randomly oriented ceramics, the 3D-printed textured ceramics exhibit remarkable property enhancements: the piezoelectric charge coefficient d ₃₃ increases from 159 to 377 pC/N, the piezoelectric voltage coefficient g ₃₃ rises from 4.41 to 27.18 mV/N, and the resulting figure of merit ( d ₃₃× g ₃₃) improved by 1361%. A piezoelectric accelerometer fabricated using the 3D-printed textured BaTiO₃ ceramics demonstrates high charge sensitivity ( S ₚ) of 14.36 pC/g, achieving a 101% improvement over its randomly oriented ceramic counterpart (7.13 pC/g), along with low nonlinearity (0.1% over 1–10 g) and stable sensitivity (< 5% variation) across 100–1500 Hz. These results confirm VPP as a viable method for fabricating high-performance textured ceramics, enabling next-generation high-sensitivity piezoelectric sensors.