Enhancing the Energy Storage Performance in Lead-Based Antiferroelectric Ceramics via Pb(Zr0.88Sn0.12)O3/(Pb0.875La0.05Sr0.05) (Zr0.695Ti0.005Sn0.3)O3-Derived Laminated Composite Structures

Abstract

Dielectric capacitors have attracted considerable attention in the search for miniaturized energy-storage devices because of their high power density and fast discharge speed. However, an obvious disadvantage is that polarization is generally sacrificed to realize high dielectric breakdown strength and vice versa, which restricts the provision of sufficient energy density in applications of dielectric capacitors. Herein, we propose a laminated composite structure model as an effective means to overcome this challenge, where one antiferroelectric Pb(Zr0.88Sn0.12)O3 layer with large polarization and another antiferroelectric (Pb0.875La0.05Sr0.05) (Zr0.695Ti0.005Sn0.3)O3 layer with high breakdown strength are needed. The theoretical simulations and experimental characterizations demonstrate that the electric-field amplifying effect of the adjacent layers effectively breaks the inverse correlation between the polarization and the dielectric breakdown strength. Consequently, the resulting laminated composite ceramics exhibit a significantly improved recoverable energy density of 13.9 J cm–3 together with a high energy efficiency of 89.9% at a high applied electric field of 50 kV mm–1. Furthermore, a large discharge energy density of 10.2 J cm–3 accompanied by a high power density of 287.5 MW cm–3, along with a wide temperature usage range of 20–120 °C and strong fatigue endurance, after 1100 discharge cycles also are realized. Therefore, this work opens up a paradigm to design high-performance dielectric materials for advanced energy storage applications.