Perovskite lead-free dielectrics for energy storage applications

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Abstract

The projected increase in world energy consumption within the next 50 years, coupled with low emission requirements, has inspired an enormous effort towards the development of efficient, clean, and renewable energy sources. Efficient electrical energy storage solutions are keys to effective implementation of the electricity generated from these renewable sources. In step with the development of energy storage technology and the power electronics industry, dielectric materials with high energy density are in high demand. The dielectrics with a medium dielectric constant, high breakdown strength, and low polarization hysteresis are the most promising candidates for high-power energy storage applications. Inspiring energy densities have been achieved in current dielectrics, but challenges exist for practical applications, where the underlying mechanisms need to be understood for further enhancing their properties to meet future energy requirements. In this review, we summarize the principles of dielectric energy-storage applications, and recent developments on different types of dielectrics, namely linear dielectrics, paraelectrics, ferroelectrics, and antiferroelectrics, are surveyed, focusing on perovskite lead-free dielectrics. The new achievements of polymer-ceramic composites in energy-storage applications are also reviewed. The pros and cons of each type of dielectric, the existing challenges, and future perspectives are presented and discussed with respect to specific applications.

Introduction

As the world population keeps growing and the global economy developing, worldwide energy consumption is increasing at a high rate. The total final energy consumption of the whole world has gone up from 54,207 TWh in 1973 to 111,125 TWh in 2016 [1]. Due to the problems caused by global warming, air pollution, and the depletion of fossil fuel resources, exploiting various clean and renewable energy sources is the obvious solution [2], [3], [4], [5]. Although more than half of our consumed energy is generated from fossil fuels, renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, or geothermal, are becoming more dominant [1]. Even so, most renewable energy is intermittent in nature, which poses challenges for harnessing these sources of energy. Converting the renewable energy to other forms (mainly electricity) is a good solution, where efficient and reliable electrical energy storage solutions are keys to effective implementation of the electricity generated from these renewable sources [2], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]. Chemical energy storage devices (batteries), solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), flywheels, superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) systems, electrochemical capacitors (ECs), and electrostatic capacitors (dielectric capacitors) represent the majority of electrical storage technologies today. The batteries and fuel cells possess high energy density but low power density, while the dielectric capacitors exhibit the opposite features. Meanwhile, the electrochemical capacitors possess medium energy density and power density. Compared with dielectric capacitors, electrochemical capacitors suffer from low operating voltage (<3 V), large leakage current (∼mA), and high cost (9500 USD/kWh) [11], [12], while dielectric capacitors are more suitable for high-voltage, low-cost, and large-scale applications.

The Ragone plot is important for benchmarking energy and power densities for energy storage devices (ESDs), being widely used for comparisons of their performance. As shown in Fig. 1, no one individual ESD can possess high energy density and high power density simultaneously. The usage of each ESD can be determined by its own characteristic time [13], i.e., based on its energy-to-power ratio or charge/discharge rate, which is represented by the straight dashed lines in Fig. 1. It should be noted that the practical charge/discharge time of the ESD is impacted by external factors such as the load resistance. As can be observed from Fig. 1, capacitors possess higher charge/discharge rates and higher power density than batteries and SOFCs. This is because capacitors store energy by displacement of bound charged elements while batteries and SOFCs store energy by chemical reactions. Capacitors have been widely used in numerous fields, such as electronic circuits with various functions (filtering, coupling, decoupling, etc.), microwave communications, hybrid electrical vehicles, distributed power systems, renewable energy storage, and high-power applications such as fusion applications, as shown in Fig. 2. Different applications require different kinds of capacitors with different characteristics. For example, the capacitors used in microwave communications applications should possess a very high quality factor (very low dielectric loss), while the capacitors used in decoupling circuits are required to possess large capacitance per unit volume. Of particular importance, the high charge/discharge rates of dielectric capacitors, corresponding to their small characteristic time in Fig. 1, make them suitable for high-power/pulse-power systems and efficient capture of energy from intermittent renewable sources [14]. The energy density of dielectric capacitors is relatively low, however, as shown in Fig. 1 [15]. High energy density dielectrics will significantly reduce the device volume (increase the volumetric efficiency), thus benefiting many applications where miniaturization, light weight, low cost, and easy integration are desirable, e.g. consumer electronics, pulsed power applications, and commercial defibrillators, to name a few [12], [15], [16], [17], [18]. In addition, if the energy density of dielectric capacitors can be improved and made comparable to those of electrochemical capacitors or even batteries, the application range of dielectric capacitors in the energy storage field will be greatly expanded [12].

Early dielectric capacitors (capacitors for short) are based on the dielectrics such as wax-impregnated paper and mica. Currently, commercially available solid-state capacitors for high-power applications are dominated by polymer and dielectric ceramics, but they usually possess limited energy density of less than 2 J/cm3 [17], [18]. Generally, ceramics possess high permittivity but low breakdown strength (BDS), while polymers exhibit high BDS but low permittivity. As polymers possess low permittivity, they are usually fabricated into film form with thickness in the micron or submicron range and are stacked into multilayer structures to achieve relatively high capacitance in real applications. Under very high electric fields, the leakage current of polymer-based film capacitors increases rapidly due to their trap-filled space charge, or due to the Schottky or Poole-Frenkel mechanisms [19]. As a result, polymer-based film capacitors cannot maintain high energy efficiency at high applied electric fields, where the high-field conduction may act as a limiting factor for energy density [20]. In addition, although biaxially orientated polypropylene (BOPP)-based capacitors have been widely used as high-power capacitors in recent decades, they are being challenged by alternatives in some applications such as deep-well drilling and aerospace industries, where the electronic equipment is required to work in a high-temperature environment (>150 °C) [21], [22]. This is due to the fact that the BDSs of many polymer films decrease sharply in association with increased conduction and losses at elevated temperature [19], [23], [24], [25]. On the contrary, the ceramics possess high permittivity and can tolerate relatively high temperature, but the BDSs are usually low. This may be partially due to the negative correlation between permittivity and BDS [26], [27], [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], as shown in Fig. 3, i.e., higher permittivity leads to lower breakdown strength due to the electrostrictive effect. The factors affecting BDS will be discussed in Section 2.2.

Based on the fabrication method and material thickness, the dielectric materials in capacitors can be categorized into thin films, thick films, and bulk materials. Thin films (<1 μm) and thick films (1–10 μm) can tolerate higher applied electric field (>1000 kV/cm) due to their smaller volume associated with less defects and impurities [34]. Therefore, they usually possess much higher energy density [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40]. Due to their small volume and low capacity, however, the total energy that can be stored in film materials is less than for their bulk counterparts. Lead-based materials have been extensively studied for bulk dielectrics, exhibiting good energy-storage performance. For example, a large recoverable energy density of 6.4 J/cm3 has been achieved in lead-based antiferroelectric ceramics [41]. The toxicity of lead-based derivatives, however, raises great environmental and human health concerns. Thus, numerous efforts have been made to explore lead-free materials to circumvent this issue [35], [42], [43], [44], including barium-based and bismuth-based dielectrics.

In this review, the fundamentals of energy storage capacitors are first introduced to highlight the basic requirements for high-energy-storage applications. In particular, the approaches to increase BDS are briefly summarised. Then, recent progress on actively studied dielectric materials is surveyed, namely, linear dielectrics, paraelectrics, ferroelectrics (FEs), and antiferroelectrics (AFEs). The multilayer ceramic capacitors and polymer-ceramic composites are also introduced. Lastly, the pros and cons of each category of material and the challenges of energy-storage dielectric capacitors are discussed, and future prospects for them based on our understanding are proposed.

Section snippets

Fundamentals of energy storage capacitors

A dielectric capacitor is usually constructed in a parallel-plate form, consisting of two conductive electrodes and a dielectric layer filled in between them. Their energy-storage capability is called capacitance (C), which can be described by the following equation:C=ε0εrAdwhere ε0 is the dielectric permittivity in vacuum (∼8.85 × 10−12 F/m), εr is the dielectric constant (or relative dielectric permittivity) of the dielectric layer, A is the overlapping area of the two electrodes, and d is

Linear dielectrics

Linear dielectrics usually possess low permittivity, low dielectric loss, and high BDS. The permittivity of an ideal linear dielectric is independent of the electric field. In other words, its polarization increases linearly with increasing electric field, without hysteresis, as shown in Fig. 4(a). All of the stored energy in the charging process can be released from the dielectric in the discharging process. The recoverable energy density can be calculated using Eq. (5). Linear dielectrics are

Summary and perspectives

The demand for exploiting and harnessing renewable energy is the driving force for the research on energy storage devices. Among these devices, electrostatic capacitors possess unique benefits, such as high charge/discharge rates, high operating voltage, and high-temperature stability, making them suitable to store the electricity harvested from intermittent renewable energy sources. One of the important figures of merit for dielectric capacitors is energy density. According to the physical

Acknowledgments

S.Z. thanks the Australian Research Council for financial support through the Future Fellowship Scheme (FT140100698). F. Li. thanks to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 51572214). H.H. and H.X.L. acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong Joint Funds (No. U1601209), the Major Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51790490), and the Technical Innovation Special Program of Hubei Province (2017AHB055). J.F.L.

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