BaTiO3 is one of the most important

BaTiO3 is one of the most important electroceramic materials. It is the basic compound that is doped to produce high permittivity dielectric materials used in multilayer capacitor components. These components are extremely useful in the control of modern electronic circuit charge supply. Over three trillion multilayer ceramic capacitors are used each year. Of those, 90% of the components are manufactured with inner electrodes of nickel that are cofired with a formulated BaTiO3 at sintering temperature of ~ 1250 ºC and an atmosphere of pO2 ~ 10-12 atms with a gas mixture of N2-H2-H2O. Cold Sintering Process (CSP) is a relative new concept but has been applied to a number of materials, many of which could also be densified to extremely high densities and properties at temperatures below 300 °C.[1–4] In some materials, including perovskite-based ferroelectrics such as BaTiO3,[5] Pb(Zr,Ti)O3,[6] and SrTiO3,[7] sintering was accomplished at low temperature conditions; however, the dielectric properties, such as the permittivity and remanent polarization, are limited without a secondary thermal treatment. In the case of the earlier studies on BaTiO3, it was the use of a transient liquid with stoichiometric adjustments to limit incongruent dissolution. This added to the densification but still leads to glassy phases in the grain boundaries that have a major limitation to the dielectric properties of these ferroelectric materials. However, on heat treatments ranging from 700°C to 900 °C, these grain boundaries equilibrate, and the glassy phase is incorporated into crystalline material. The metastable glass in the BaTiO3 microstructure is associated with a BaCO3 phase. This phase has to decompose to allow the complete densification of the microstructure and the glassy interface dominants the dielectric properties limiting performance without this secondary heat treatment. Alkali metal hydroxide fluxes have been employed as “high-temperature solutions” to aid synthesizing new oxides and grow crystals of known compositions and structures.[8] The NaOH-KOH mixture have a eutectic point of 170 oC and it has been used for synthesizing a variety of complex oxides at low temperatures.[9–13] The objective of this study is to utilize hydroxide additives to aid the cold sintering of BaTiO3 and avoid the second heat treatments following the preliminary work in some binary oxides.[14] The microstructure and comparisons of the dielectric properties will be made relative to previous reports on high quality BaTiO3 materials fabricated at high temperatures with submicron grain sizes.