Adherence enhacement of metallic film on PZT type ceramic using nitrogen plasma implantation

Summary form only given. Metal-ceramic junction requires special attention because it involves very large differences in chemical and mechanical, affinity between both surfaces, causing great tensile stress which may lead to component failures. Nowadays, technological advances have allowed the use of bound metal ceramic materials in various hybrid systems such as in electronic components, light bulbs, electrical insulation for vacuum monitoring devices and other applications in precision engineering industry. However, in some applications, such as in electrodes of PZT type ceramic used as piezoelectric sensors, the metallic film deposition on the ceramic substrate has low adherence, which causes the film release during welding process in electronic component manufacture due to the large difference in thermal expansion gradients of the film and ceramic. Therefore, in order to increase the film adherence on the ceramic it is proposed in this work the treatment of PZT samples covered with silver metallic films by means of plasma immersion ion implantation (PIII) technique using a high power 40 kV/1μs stacked Blumlein pulser. The reason is that it was demonstrated in literature that PIII processing is quite adequate for treating different type of materials to improve their mechanical, physical, chemical and tribological surface properties without changing their bulk or dimensions. In this paper, it is shown that using nitrogen plasma implantation for PZT sample surface treatment increases the mechanical anchoring or adherence of the electrode metallic silver film to allow the welding process of terminals in the piezoelectric device manufacture without film release failure.