Fine scale 1-3 composites fabricated by the soft mold process: Preparationand modeling

The "soft mold" process offers the opportunity to fabricate fine scale 1-3 composites with free design of the piezoceramic rods. 1-3 composites with d ifferent volume fractions of arrayed PZT rods in a polymer matrix with diam eters between 35 mu m and 150 mu m have been prepared successfully by this method. After poling the dielectric and electromechanical properties were d etermined. The experimental results were compared to calculated data from a nalytical approximations and modeling with the Finite Element Method (FEM).