Magnetoelectric composites have attracted much attention due to their
intriguing physical properties and potential applications. They might have
strong magnetoelectric coupling effect above room temperature, but it mainly
depends on the sintering schedule. In this paper,
0.2Ni0.9Zn0.1Fe2O4-0.8Ba0.9Sr0.1TiO3 (NZFO-BSTO) composite ceramics were
prepared by conventional solid sintering method. Effects of the sintering
temperature (1050, 1100, 1150 and 1200?C) on the microstructure, dielectric
and multiferroic properties were investigated in detail. XRD results confirm
that the prepared ceramics show bi-phase structure, which can be indexed as
NZFO and BSTO. No obvious impurity phase was observed when the sintering
temperature is less than 1200?C, indicating that there is no apparent
chemical reaction occuring at the magnetic and ferroelectric interface. All
of the samples show relatively dense and uniform structure. The mean grain
size of the composites increases from 220 to 650 nm when the sintering
temperature increases from 1050?C to 1200?C. The sample ST-1100 has the
best frequency stability of dielectric constant, while it presents the
smallest dielectric loss. All specimens present two dielectric peaks, the
first one is attributed to the diffuse phase transition of BSTO, while
another one generated at higher temperature corresponds to the relaxation
polarization. The sample ST-1100 shows excellent ferroelectric properties,
the value of remnant polarization is about 5.1 ?C/cm2 and the coercive
electric field value is ~20 kV/cm. The ceramics ST-1050 and ST-1200 show
larger leakage current. All samples show paramagnetic behaviour with small
remnant magnetization (~0.3 emu/g) and coercive magnetic field (~30Oe). The
sample ST-1100 has maximum magnetoelectric coupling coefficient of
9.6mV/cm?Oe when the magnetic field is near 1100Oe.