Significant Improvement in Magnetic and Magnetoelectric Characteristics of (0.95 − x)Ba0.9Ca0.1TiO3-0.05Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3-xCoFe2O4 Ceramics

Abstract

Multi-functional materials with high magnetic, electrical, and magnetoelectric characteristics play an important role in development of data storage devices. Herein, a multi-phase (0.95-x)Ba0.9Ca0.1TiO3-0.05Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3-xCoFe2O4 ceramics were prepared by two-stage mechanochemical activation technique. The objective of this study is to develop a multifunctional material with improved multiferroic characteristics. The structural analysis by Rietveld method shows the presence of heterogeneous structure without any impurity phase. The incorporation of CoFe2O4 (CFO) in 0.95Ba0.9Ca0.1TiO3-0.05Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3 (BCT-NBT) has resulted in significant improvement in magnetic and magnetoelectric characteristics without significantly hampering the electrical properties. The sample with x = 0.11 has shown high saturation magnetization of 8.26 emu/g along with moderately high magnetoelectric coefficient of 5.411 mV/cm.Oe. In addition to this, the energy storage performance of all the studied samples have also been investigated and the optimized sample x = 0.11 presents a large discharge energy density of 2.249 J/cm3 and moderately high energy efficiency of 63.8% at 388 kV/cm. The results obtained in the present work suggest a significant influence of CFO substitution on the magnetic characteristics of BCT-NBT ceramics, which subsequently indicate their potential applications in spintronics, magnetic memory storage, and electrical energy storage devices.