Designing barium titanate ceramics with high energy storage and mechanical properties

Abstract

Designing the fine-grained ceramics with high recoverable energy storage density and excellent mechanical performance, still presents great challenges. Because the ceramics with large pore size and low relative density were obtained by the traditional sintering method, they always exhibit small breakdown strength and poor mechanical properties, which limits the miniaturization and operation of devices in harsh environments. In this article, we designed the barium titanate ceramics (BT) ceramics with grain size of 252 nm and relative density of 0.92 can be obtained via co-sintering of two sizes of BT particles at 1000 °C for 10 h. The cubic phase BT particles with 80 nm are doped in the tetragonal phase BT particles with 200 nm to obtain tetragonal phase fine-grained BT ceramics. When doped with 80 nm BT particles, the sintering of 200 nm BT particles is promoted. The enhanced sinterability is due to the phase transformation and metastability, which act as sintering aids. The obtained BT ceramics with nanodomains, high energy storage, and mechanical properties. The discharge energy density is of 0.81 J/cm3, and the Vickers hardness is 1.75 GPa.