Superior energy storage properties and excellent stability achieved in environment-friendly ferroelectrics via composition design strategy

Abstract

Abstract With increasing demand of environmental protection and development of pulsed power technologies, environment-friendly ferroelectrics with superior energy storage properties (ESP) have attracted more and more attention in recent years. However, the recoverable energy storage density (Wrec), the energy storage efficiency (η) and the electric breakdown strength (Eb) of most environment-friendly ceramics are lower than 3 J cm−3, 80% and 300 kV cm−1, respectively. In this work, we induced the polar nano regions (PNRs) and decreased grain size to submicron scale via composition design strategy to optimize the ESP. The ultra-high Wrec (6.64 J cm−3) and η (96.5%) can be achieved simultaneously for (1-x)Bi0.5Na0.5TiO3-xSrNb0.5Al0.5O3 ((1-x)BNT-xSNA) environment-friendly ceramics with x = 0.20 at 520 kV cm−1. Obviously, the samples maintain high η (>92%) within the frequency range of 1–100 Hz and the temperature range of 30–150 °C. Therefore, the (1-x)BNT-xSNA ceramics possess superior ESP and excellent stability of ESP, which are promising candidate environment-friendly materials for pulsed power systems applications.