High temperature lead-free BNT-based ceramics with stable energy storage and dielectric properties

Abstract

High-temperature dielectric ceramics are in urgent demand due to the rapid development of numerous emerging applications. However, producing dielectric ceramics with favorable temperature, frequency and electric field stability is still a huge challenge. The construction of multi-phase coexistence material systems is an effective way to obtain stable dielectric and energy storage properties. In this work, NaNbO₃ (NN) modified 0.95Bi_0.5Na_0.5TiO₃–0.05SrZrO₃ (BNTSZ) ceramics ((1 − x)BNTSZ–xNN) are designed to achieve the coexistence of rhombohedral and tetragonal phases. The variation in the dielectric permittivity of the 0.8BNTSZ–0.2NN ceramic is less than ±15% over the temperature range from −55 °C to 545 °C, which is the reported record-high upper operating temperature, with a high room-temperature dielectric permittivity of 1170. The 0.8BNTSZ–0.2NN ceramic exhibits excellent frequency and electric field stability as well. Additionally, a large discharge energy density of 3.14 J cm⁻³ is obtained in the 0.85BNTSZ–0.15NN ceramic with an energy efficiency of 79% at a high temperature of 120 °C under 230 kV cm⁻¹, with the variation in the discharge energy density being less than ±4% in the temperature range from 25 °C to 180 °C under 120 kV cm⁻¹. All these features demonstrate that the (1 − x)BNTSZ–xNN ceramics are promising candidates for use at extremely high temperature in both dielectric and energy storage capacitor applications.